I, being born a woman and distressed (Sonnet XLI)
Edna St. Vincent Millay * Track #15 On AS and A-Level English Literature Anthology: Love Poetry Throughout The Ages
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Album AS and A-Level English Literature Anthology: Love Poetry Throughout The Ages
- #1Whoso List to Hunt
Thomas Wyatt
- #2
Sonnet 116William Shakespeare
- #3The Flea
John Donne
- #4To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell
- #5
The ScrutinyRichard Lovelace
- #6Song: Absent From Thee
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
- #7
The Garden of LoveWilliam Blake
- #8Song (Ae fond kiss)
Robert Burns
- #9She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron
- #10
RememberChristina Rossetti
- #11
The Ruined MaidThomas Hardy
- #12At An Inn
Thomas Hardy
- #13La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats
- #14
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno CynaraeErnest Dowson
- #15I, being born a woman and distressed (Sonnet XLI)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- #16
Love and a QuestionRobert Frost
- #17A Quoi Bon Dire
Charlotte Mew
- #18One Flesh
Elizabeth Jennings
- #19Meeting Point
Louis MacNeice
- #20For My Lover, Returning To His Wife
Anne Sexton
- #21
Wild OatPhilip Larkin
- #22Talking in Bed - The Whitsun Weddings
Philip Larkin
- #23
PunishmentSeamus Heaney
- #24Vergissmeinnicht
Keith Douglas
- #25Timer
Tony Harrison
- #26The Love Poem
Carol Ann Duffy
- #27Long Finish
Paul Muldoon
- #28
After the LunchWendy Cope
I, being born a woman and distressed (Sonnet XLI) by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Performed by
Edna St. Vincent MillayAbout
As intense in her sonnets as in her love life, Millay explains how she, as a sexualised woman, responds to a man. She allowed herself to enjoy sex with him. However, she won’t remember him lovingly or even want to talk to him. The poet challenges the attitudes of the time — the poem was written in...
I, being born a woman and distressed (Sonnet XLI) Annotated
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.