stormy weather

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XIX from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, 1923.

This isn't really my favorite of hers, nor even my favorite of the sonnets in Harp-Weaver and Other Poems -- of which I inexplicably own a first edition picked up in a used bookstore during some poetry month past -- but I do love sonnets, and I love hers.