Analysis of Sonnets 08: And You As Well Must Die, Beloved Dust

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



And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,--this wonder fled.
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.


Scheme ABBACBBCDEFDDE
Poetic Form
Metre 011111011 0111011011 1101011011 11011010101 1111010101 1111011111 1011111101 100101001 11110110110 0111111101 0111010101 110001010 111110010 1101011111
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 575
Words 110
Sentences 5
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 32
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 451
Words per stanza (avg) 107
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 28, 2023

33 sec read
83

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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