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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 Gender
Blur
by Andrew Hudgins
Children in a Field
by Angela Shaw
Fast Speaking Woman [excerpt]
by Anne Waldman
Ontario
by Mark Levine
poem in praise of menstruation
by Lucille Clifton
poem to my uterus
by Lucille Clifton
Sci-Fi
by Tracy K. Smith
Stones
by Michael Blumenthal
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I, Being born a Woman and Distressed (Sonnet XLI)

 
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, being born a woman and distressed 
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.






Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I, Being born a Woman and Distressed [Sonnet XLI]," from Collected Poems. Copyright 1931, 1934, 1939, © 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Millay Society. www.millay.org.
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