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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Love
Paradise Lost, Book IV, Lines 639–652
by John Milton
A Ditty
by Sir Philip Sidney
A Drinking Song
by W. B. Yeats
Answer to a Child's Question
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
Credo
by Matthew Rohrer
Dear Tiara
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Dependants
by Paul Farley
Elegy in Joy [excerpt]
by Muriel Rukeyser
Epithalamium
by Matthew Rohrer
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I Love You
by Sara Teasdale
In Passing
by Stanley Plumly
Invitation to Love
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
It Was Raining In Delft
by Peter Gizzi
June Light
by Richard Wilbur
Love
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lullaby
by W. H. Auden
Midwinter Day [Excerpt]
by Bernadette Mayer
Miss Sally on Love
by Shara McCallum
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
by William Shakespeare
Ode, Aubade
by Greg Wrenn
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings
Sonnets on Love XIII
by Jean de Sponde
syntax
by Maureen N. McLane
The Love Unfeigned
by Geoffrey Chaucer
To Dorothy
by Marvin Bell
True Love
by Robert Penn Warren
True Love
by Barry Gifford
Two Loves
by Lord Alfred Douglas
What Is True
by Ben Kopel
What Was Told, That
by Jalalu'l-din Rumi
When You are Old
by W. B. Yeats
Who Shall Doubt
by George Oppen
Whom You Love
by Joseph O. Legaspi
Wild Nights – Wild Nights! (249)
by Emily Dickinson
Yours
by Daniel Hoffman
Other Sonnets
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
by Ted Berrigan
A Sonnet from the Archive Of Love's Failures, Volumes 1-3.5 Million
by Anne Boyer
Acquainted with the Night
by Robert Frost
American Sonnet (10)
by Wanda Coleman
American Sonnet (35)
by Wanda Coleman
Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland
Autumn
by Richard Garcia
Chopin
by Emma Lazarus
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
by William Wordsworth
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
by John Donne
Discourse
by Forrest Hamer
Echoes
by Emma Lazarus
Gapped Sonnet
by Suzanne Gardinier
God's Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, read by Karen Volkman
Half-Hearted Sonnet
by Kim Addonizio
History
by Robert Lowell
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I shall forget you presently, my dear (Sonnet XI)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love Song for Love Songs
by Rafael Campo
Mother Night
by James Weldon Johnson
My Letters! all dead paper... (Sonnet 28)
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
by William Shakespeare
Oil & Steel
by Henri Cole
Sappho and Phaon: Sonnet III
by Mary Robinson
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18)
by William Shakespeare
Shawl
by Albert Goldbarth
Silence
by Thomas Hood
Sonnet
by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Sonnet 1
by Gwendolyn Bennett
Sonnet 100
by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville
Sonnet 101 [Ways apt and new to sing of love I'd find]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 131 [I'd sing of Love in such a novel fashion]
by Petrarch
Sonnet 6
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]
by Petrarch
Sonnet V
by Mahmoud Darwish
Sonnet [Nothing was ever what it claimed to be,]
by Karen Volkman
Sonnet—Silence
by Edgar Allan Poe
Testing Gardening
by Marie Ponsot
Today We Make the Poet's Words Our Own
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Untitled [You did say, need me less and I'll want you more]
by Marilyn Hacker
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
by John Milton
Without Discussion
by Samuel Amadon
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I think I should have loved you presently (Sonnet IX)

 
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.



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