Summary
The speaker warns her addressee not to make assumptions. Though her body has disobeyed her mind by feeling attracted to the addressee, she feels neither love nor pity for them . Her strong feelings of physical attraction are not, she explains, any motivation for her to talk to the addressee next time they see one another.
Analysis
Following the eighth line of an Italian sonnet, a volta (or turn) takes place. The volta represents a general change in the poem, both in form and content. One way in which the form shifts is a change in rhyme scheme, from the ABBA pattern with which the poem opens to either a CDCDCD or a CDECDE pattern. Here, we see that Millay has chosen the CDCDCD option, using words that end either with "-eason" or with "ain": "treason" or "season" and "brain" or "again." By choosing the repeated CD rhymes rather than adding in a third ending, (as she would with a CDE rhyme scheme), Millay uses a more repetitive pattern. But her choice of repetition doesn't stop there. For one thing, the "-eason" endings are two-syllable rhymes, in which nearly the entire word—rather than just the final syllable—is identical. Furthermore, the "-eason" and the "-ain" endings are similar even to one another, since both end with a vowel followed by an N. In other words, Millay has chosen to make the sonnet's second half extremely repetitive, even relentless, as far as sound and rhyme are concerned.
This relentlessness is present not only in sound elements, but in the speaker's tone. In the first half of the poem, the speaker is somewhat equivocal. She is open in her admission of the attraction she feels to the addressee, even as she shares the unexpectedness and irrationality of that attraction. But in the second half, during the closing sestet, she seems to realize that she has been careless in sharing her feelings, or else that her addressee is misinterpreting her words. The speaker takes a firm, unambiguous tone to ensure she cannot be misunderstood: despite the conflict between her body and her brain, she knows exactly what she does and does not desire. Moreover, while the speaker spends the opening octave describing the irrationality of her body and its betrayal of her rational mind, she takes on a thoroughly rational stance in this second section. With phrases like "I find this frenzy insufficient reason," she gives the impression of scientific objectivity as she coolly assesses her situation and comes to a conclusion. Her firmness, logic, and clarity invite a range of interpretations, some regarding the speaker herself, some regarding the addressee, and some simply regarding the society they live in. For instance, it is possible to read this as evidence that the speaker is rude or insensitive. But it is also possible to understand her insistence as a response to egotism or stubbornness on the addressee's part: perhaps they are unable or unwilling to believe that the speaker does not feel love for them. Finally, we can read the speaker's firmness as a response to societal norms around gender and sex: she insists that, while women's sexuality may be interpreted as evidence of emotional investment, in her case it is no such thing.
