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.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 28, 2023

33 sec read
83

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABBACBBCDEFDDE
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 575
Words 110
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14

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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