Everyone can suffer, even those who seem to have nothing but strength. In the poem “An Ancient Gesture” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the speaker compares herself to Penelope, the wife of the great hero Odysseus, and shows that even she felt pain, and that it is not a weakness, but a necessity. The poem compares the two using brief, simple sentences and short comparisons. Rather than use overly drawn out descriptions, Millay instead writes using short sentences and stanzas. Despite the fact that she’s describing a painful event she doesn’t use much melodramatic language and instead describes events very succinctly using concrete facts. Despite her simple language and short, factual descriptions, she is still able to create a genuinely somber
