Summary
The speaker addresses an unnamed listener, listing things for which she doesn't wish to be pitied. Among those things are the setting of the sun at night, beautiful seasonal sights that fade away, the ebbing of the tide, and the waning of the moon. The final item in the list is the desire of a man—the listener—who no longer loves the speaker.
Analysis
Millay builds this first section of her poem out of a series of linked metaphors, which build up into an argument that the speaker neither needs nor deserves pity. With the revelation that she is addressing a specific listener, and that this listener no longer loves her, we understand that the previous descriptions—of waning moons, ebbing tides, and setting suns—are being compared to the speaker's experience of heartbreak. In a way, the writer has set up a puzzle for readers, challenging them to tease out the relationship between these seemingly unrelated phenomena. What exactly does a breakup or heartbreak have to do with these natural processes? The hint comes in the poem's title and first line, "pity me not." The reason that the speaker needs no pity, she suggests, is because her own situation is as natural and inevitable as the sunset. The speaker seems to be distancing herself from her emotions or else rationalizing them, a process enacted not only by what she says but by the order in which she says it. Only at the end of a long list of poetic images does the speaker address her former lover, as if she has waited as long as possible to acknowledge her loss.
The highly controlled, organized structure of the poem gives a further glimpse into the speaker's mindset, revealing how hard she has worked to control her own emotional response. "Pity me not" is repeated at the beginning of multiple lines, and this anaphora gives the impression that the speaker is working hard to internalize or convey her central idea. This poem, as indicated in the title, is a sonnet (specifically an English or Shakespearian sonnet)—therefore it follows the traditional formal guidelines of the genre. One of these features is rhyme scheme. English sonnets typically follow an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG pattern. These first eight lines follow exactly such a rhyme scheme, which comes across as highly predictable and cyclical—much like the natural processes being described. Another sonnet feature is iambic pentameter, a metrical pattern in which each line is composed of ten syllables with the stress falling on every second syllable. This poem generally follows that meter, but subverts it slightly because the repeated phrase "pity me not" places emphasis on the first rather than second syllable of the line. This disrupts the expected meter, hinting at the speaker's distress: while she tries to convince her listener of her emotional control, her feelings crop up subtly, disrupting the highly structured patterns of the poem.
Sonnets are centered around a volta, or turning point, where both content and form radically shift. In English sonnets, that volta falls near the end of the poem, after line twelve. Here, Millay inserts a kind of micro-volta after line eight by using a period. The first eight lines of the poem all consist of a single sentence, so the end of that sentence signals a shift. Given that the poem reveals the specific nature of the speaker's troubles in line eight—namely, that the "you" no longer loves her—it's reasonable to assume that the next part of the poem, following that long opening sentence, will more explicitly explore the nature of this lost love.
