"What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay is an effective short poem, which feeds on the dissonance between the ideal of love and its reality, the heartbreak. In William Shakespeare's "Let Me Not to The Marriage of True Minds", the effectiveness is weakened by its ideality and metaphysical stereotype. Unlike Millay, Shakespeare paints a genuine portrait of what love should be but unfortunately never really is. This factor is what makes his poetry difficult to relate to, thus weakening the effect on the reader. These poems were published some distance apart, three hundred and fourteen years to be exact, which may explain the change in idealism. Although both circumnavigate the concept of love, the effect left in both writers based on personal affairs greatly differentiates the characters of both speakers. In Millay's poem "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where and Why" she laments lost lovers. Ironically, she is described as remembering them fondly and forgetting them regretfully. In the second and third lines, the speaker recalls the lips and arms of young people who have embraced her in the past, rather than their faces, suggesting her ignorance of their identities or names. He continues, “tonight the rain is full of ghosts.” (3-4) In this octave he uses raindrops hitting the glass of a window to represent the sighs of lost lovers. He also compares raindrops to ghosts as a metaphor for the memories of lost lovers, whose absence he feels, even though they have vanished into a vague abyss. In this comparison, he also uses window glass to show the separation between present and past, or a boundary that allows for understanding but not interference. He is able to look back on his past but not change anything he has done, so he can only remember and unfortunately only regret. She describes “a silent pain” (6) in her heart “for forgotten boys” (6-7) emphasizing her loneliness and pain caused by these senseless encounters. In the sextet Millay compares himself to a "lonely tree" (9) "with the birds vanishing one by one" (10) and "branches quieter than before." (11) The tree is an analogy for his lost chances of true love. The lack of leaves and the singing of birds on the branches of trees mean the loss of youth and lovers. In the last lines of the poem, Millay's character realizes that none of the young people want her, now that she has grown old..