Collection: Second April

Overview
Second April, published in 1921 by Edna St. Vincent Millay, gathers a constellation of brief lyrics and longer meditations that continue the poet's exploration of love, loss, and renewal. The collection moves between intimate confession and amused detachment, presenting speakers who are fiercely alive to desire yet wary of its costs. Millay's voice shifts from coy playfulness to sharp introspection, offering snapshots of emotional weather rather than a single narrative arc.
The collection is compact and concentrated, favoring economy of line and clarity of feeling. It balances traditional forms with moments of irregularity, allowing formal constraints to heighten emotional candor rather than restrain it. The result is a set of poems that feel both immediate and carefully wrought, each one attending to the texture of feeling as much as to rhetorical finish.

Themes
Love appears as the central preoccupation, examined from multiple angles: the exhilaration of new desire, the quiet ache of unreciprocated feeling, and the rueful, sometimes ironic, accounting of passion's aftermath. Millay treats love not as a single subject but as a shifting scene, where tenderness and cruelty, hope and disillusionment, coexist. Desire is often framed against time and change, so longing becomes inseparable from mortality and the passing seasons.
Nature and the changing year function as an emotional map. Spring and April imagery recurs as a motif of revival and fragile beginnings, while darker natural details underline loss and limitation. Social expectations and the roles available to women also surface implicitly, shaping the speaker's choices and the moral economy of the poems. There is an ethical intelligence at work: affection is pursued with gusto, but its consequences receive sober scrutiny.

Form and Style
Formal mastery is a hallmark of the collection. Millay employs sonnets, quatrains, and short lyrics with crystalline diction and precise meter, yet she frequently subverts neat closure with subjunctive lines and evasive rhymes. The interplay between regular form and colloquial expression creates a convivial tension: the verse feels polished but never decorative. Where she experiments, it is to underline emotional complexity rather than to foreground novelty.
Lineation is economical; enjambment often propels thought forward, and a single turn of phrase can pivot a poem from felicity to regret. Millay's ear for sound, internal rhyme, alliteration, and well-placed caesura, keeps the poems singing even when their subject matter turns bleak. Humor and irony are deployed as stylistic tools, softening melancholy while also sharpening its sting.

Imagery and Tone
Imagery tends to the tactile and domestic as often as to the pastoral. Small physical details, a garment, a room, the turned earth of a garden, anchor feeling in lived experience, making abstract sorrow tangible. Seasonal and floral motifs recur, but they are treated with an adult awareness of transience; spring is lovely and risky rather than unambiguously renewing.
The tonal range moves from jaunty bravado to whispered confession. Many poems adopt a conversational candidness that disarms the reader, then reveal an undercurrent of vulnerability. Wit coexists with mourning, and the speaker's self-possession is frequently undermined by an admission of fear or longing that feels wholly human.

Legacy and Context
Second April sits between Millay's earlier breakthroughs and the later, more ambitious pieces that would solidify her reputation. It refines the persona that made her famous: a keen-eyed, linguistically agile poet who could make intimate emotion matter on the page. The collection helped sustain Millay's public image as both a lyricist of desire and a modern moral observer.
Though not uniformly experimental, the volume demonstrated how formal craft could serve candid modern sensibility. Its poems continue to read as precise, emotionally direct statements that balance youthful urgency with a maturing awareness of consequence, offering readers a portrait of longing seasoned by irony and tempered by time.