Summary
The speaker introduces herself by saying that she is a woman, and is therefore burdened by the various needs and desires faced by women. As a result of these womanly weaknesses, she is affected by the presence of an unidentified addressee. The addressee's physical closeness makes her wish to feel their weight on her—after all, the emotion of lust is perfectly made to spur the body into action, while undermining the mind's logical capabilities.
Analysis
From the moment this poem begins, it's clear that we are in the hands of a confident and self-aware speaker. Millay starts the work with the word "I," and this first-person pronoun functions as a declaration of the speaker's control over the monologue. Thus, even when she goes on to speak self-deprecatingly—depicting her desire as the product of feminine frivolity and weak-mindedness—that self-deprecation comes within a context of self-assurance. This lets us know that the speaker isn't being entirely serious about her "needs and notions." Instead, she's subverting stereotypes about femininity, either by speaking sarcastically or by actually pretending to be a harmlessly incompetent figure. As the poem carries on, the speaker begins to describe her attraction to her addressee in fairly graphic terms (at least for an early twentieth-century depiction of female sexuality). For instance, she makes use of words relating to visceral, embodied experience: "body," "weight," "breast," "pulse." Even balanced by euphemisms like "the fume of life," these words ground the poem in an earthy physicality. The poem gains a compelling tension from the juxtaposition of coyness and bluntness. Thematically, one way to understand that contrast between the speaker's two demeanors is as a way to present sexual desire in a socially acceptable way. The speaker blends her statement of desire with an admission of exaggerated, unworldly innocence. In doing so, she makes her lust appear a result of that innocence, rather than a refutation of it.
This poem takes the form of an Italian sonnet, meaning that it is made up of fourteen lines. Those fourteen total lines can be roughly broken up into two shorter sections: an eight-line beginning (or octave) and a six-line ending (or sestet). Those two sections often discuss slightly different content, or approach similar themes from different perspectives. They are also formally different, with the rhyme scheme shifting between the first and second sections. The octave usually consists of an ABBA rhyme scheme repeated twice, while the sestet varies, with common options including CDCDCD or CDECDE. In this first part of Millay's poem, we see that first ABBA rhyme scheme play out with the end sounds of "ed," as in "zest" or "distressed," and "ind," as in "kind" or "mind." Though the opening octave of an Italian sonnet is made of two distinct repetitions of the ABBA pattern, Millay works hard to knit those repetitions together into one seamless thought. The whole octave is a single long sentence, and thoughts continue unbroken across line breaks. Thus, Millay links the opening lines' ironic exploration of femininity to the later lines' declaration of desire, presenting them as a single phenomenon. Only at the end of the eight lines does this sentence end, suggesting that the rest of the poem will take a different approach.
