Analysis of Sonnets 05: Once More Into My Arid Days Like Dew

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 (Rockland) – 1950 (Austerlitz)



Once more into my arid days like dew,
Like wind from an oasis, or the sound
Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,
A treacherous messenger, the thought of you
Comes to destroy me; once more I renew
Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found
Long since to be but just one other mound
Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.
And once again, and wiser in no wise,
I chase your colored phantom on the air,
And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise
And stumble pitifully on to where,
Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,
Once more I clasp,—and there is nothing there.


Scheme ABBAABBACDCDCD
Poetic Form
Metre 1101110111 1111010101 1111010010 01001000111 1101111101 1101010111 1111111101 111111101 0101010011 1111010101 0101010101 0101000111 1000011101 1111011101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 571
Words 111
Sentences 3
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 32
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 450
Words per stanza (avg) 108
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

33 sec read
102

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism more…

All Edna St. Vincent Millay poems | Edna St. Vincent Millay Books

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