What Lipps My Lips Have Kissed By Edna St. Vincent

In the poem, ‘What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,’ Edna St. Vincent describes memories of past lovers she used to have in her youthful days. The speaker begins by stating “what lips” her lips have kissed and “where and why.” These are not expressed as questions, but instead is linked with the second line “I have forgotten,” causing the reader to presume these are questions that the speaker is asking in order to recall these sensual experiences and to whom to attribute the memories. This sends an impression to the reader, suggesting that the speaker was constantly changing lovers. The speaker then explains the haunted nature of these memories, made evident in the line “the rain is full of ghosts tonight (3-4) and depicts her frustration as the ghosts wait for a reply from her heart where “stirs a …show more content…
A metaphor is evident in “the rain is full of ghosts tonight,” symbolising the speaker being haunted by her forgotten lovers. The line “will turn to me at midnight with a cry,” encompasses powerful imagery as it attempts to bring back the speaker’s sensation among taking the reader to that moment as well. The shift in the sonnet from the opening octave to the closing sestet is indicated by the choice of the word “thus” as a transition word. This is where the poet proceeds to the extended metaphor of comparing herself to a “lonely tree” (9) in winter that can no longer recall “the birds” (10) that have laid on her “boughs” (11). It is from this metaphor that the reader makes the assumption that the birds are a metaphor for the speaker’s forgotten lovers and that the term boughs is a metaphor for her own limbs. In the final unrhymed couplet, the use of personification and metaphor is evident in the lines “I only know that summer sang in me a little while” (13-14) enveloping up the speaker’s cry of pain that this “summer,” a metaphor for joy is now forever