"I, being born a woman and distressed" is a poem by American author

Edna St. Vincent Millay Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She wrote much of he ...

. The poem appeared in Millay's 1923 collection ''The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems''. The first-person speaker of the fourteen-line, Italian sonnet addresses a potential lover. She confesses to an intense physical attraction but denies the possibility of any emotional or intellectual connection.

Text

Interpretations

The speaker of the poem openly describes her "zest/To bear nother person'sbody's weight upon erbreast" in a physical "frenzy" (Millay 4-5, 13). This blunt admission of female sexual desire in a woman's voice has led some readers to view the sonnet as a "frank, feminist poem" in which Millay "acknowledg sher biological needs as a woman that leave her 'undone, possessed'". What is perhaps more groundbreaking than the honesty with which Millay describes sexual desire is her speaker's refusal to couple desire with love; the physical is "insufficient reason/For conversation when he loversmeet again" (Millay 13-14). She offers her sexual partner neither "love" nor "pity" (Millay 11, 12). This poem might serve as evidence that Millay truly was an emblem of the New Woman in "pursuit of authentic intimate relations without interference from artificial constraints, legal or social, or their psychological residue, jealousy." Rather than interpreting the conflict of the poem as an interpersonal one, some critics view the conflict as an internalized "battle of blood against brain." The body may "cloud the mind" of the speaker, but her "staggering brain" loses to her own "stout blood," not to her lover's moves in some sexual contest (Millay 7, 10). By positioning the woman as subject, not object, Millay simultaneously fulfills and subverts the conventions of the sonnet.

References

{{reflist 1923 poems Poems in English