Pity Me Not (Sonnet 29) Essay Questions

How does Millay explore and recontextualize the sonnet form in this work?

At the height of literary Modernism, the sonnet and other conventionalized poetic forms were viewed as somewhat old-fashioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay reimagined this older form, interrogating the traditional links between poetic form and content while infusing her sonnet with a feminist point of view. Sonnets have often been associated with love poems, so Millay's use of the form to describe lost love—and to question the concept of love entirely—sets a familiar structure on new thematic ground. Millay underscores that newness by sticking to the form's rules closely, choosing not to deviate from traditional sonnet meter or rhyme scheme, so that the contrast between her themes and her form is even more striking.

Discuss the metaphorical significance of the waning moon and ebbing tide.

Millay's speaker compares male desire specifically to these two natural cycles, using them to demonstrate that this desire is by nature impermanent. The specific choice of these images is notable for several reasons. First, the images, and the language used to describe them, portray peaceful and even beautiful scenes, which, in contrast with later images of more violent natural processes, suggest that the speaker is understating her pain. Second, the moon and tides are highly predictable and cyclical, which suggests that the speaker may on some level think that love will return to her, just as the moon eventually waxes after waning. Finally, and enigmatically, these images are often traditionally associated not with masculinity but with femininity. Thus, Millay is interrogating and subtly overturning certain poetic traditions around gender and sex.

How does Millay use anaphora to shape her poem?

Anaphora is a literary device in which a phrase or word is repeated multiple times. Here the phrase “Pity me not” is anaphorically repeated three times, at the beginning of three different lines throughout the poem. In the penultimate line, Millay makes a significant alteration to this repeated line, writing "pity me" rather than "pity me not." This repetition of “Pity me not” followed by the near-repetition “Pity me” sets the stage for the speaker's change of heart, with the final, altered repetition presenting a response or retort to the previous repetitions. In this way, Millay uses anaphora to intensify the arc of the Shakespearian sonnet, in which the final two lines traditionally respond to or reframe the previous twelve.