Quotations and Literature Forum

Hello I am Spanish and I need help with a poem.
I have to analyze the poem for the next monday and I cannot understand it very well.
In change I can help your to learn spanish if you want. HELP!!!!
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your proppinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breasts:
So subtly the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor reason
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.

Susan28,
For a start, google the first line and you'll get more general info about the author, Edna St Vincent Millay,and her outlook on life. She was a feminist and this is a pretty outspoken poem for her time.

She seems to be crying out about her desperate physical need for a lover, how his/her(she may have been bi-sexual) propinquity, ie nearness, drives her to distraction.
Having made love and satisfied her own desires she is angry that her need has made her submit to another. She then wants to reject them and will not even bother to acknowledge them when they meet.

Strange and troubled lady!!

http://www.123helpme.com/assets/8094.html
This is also an essay which partly discusses the poem and may help give you some ideas about it, although it is a bit rambling.

Good luck

GT

_________________
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
e e cummings (1894 - 1962)

Thank for your help gumtree
According to Millay people are really not in love but they are only together for one reason:sex.
According to the last line she has been meeting a man with only that purpose: sex.
Sonnet: ABBAABBACDCDCD, iambic pentameter.
I divide the poem in three parts: introduction (1-5), body (6-12) and the conclusion (final couple).

I have been thinking about this poem:
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.
The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

The poem is about death.
This poem is about how short life is and how precious it is. It is a sad thing that all the beauty in people comes to an end when they dye.
I think Edna St. Vincent Millay was maybe agnostic because she gives no hopes for eternal life.
t is very sad and pesimistic poem.
Blossom symbolizes eternity.
3 parts: introduction (4 first lines), body (eight next lines) and conclusion (4 last lines).