Summary
The speaker says that she has always known that love is as unreliable as a flower battered by wind, or as a wave leaving litter on the shore. The real pity, she explains, isn't the withdrawal of her lover's affections. Rather, it's the behavior of her own heart. Though her mind has adjusted to her new reality, her heart is unable to come to terms with it.
Analysis
In many ways, this part of the poem carries on the patterns established in the first section. This is true not only of the formal elements of rhyme and meter, which continue unchanged, but also of the poem's content. Millay carries on with her metaphorical references to cyclical natural processes. In some ways these metaphors are identical to the earlier ones: here the speaker mentions ocean waves, whereas earlier she described the ocean's tides. But these metaphors are tonally distinct, evoking a very different side of nature even while carrying on the depiction of unchanging cycles. Whereas the poem's early lines reference serene "beauties," these phenomena are harsh and even violent: a flower is "assailed" and the ocean "strew[s] fresh wreckage." This natural world is stormy and full of conflict, and it presages the revelation of internal conflict within the speaker.
The poem's volta occurs after line twelve: here, the rhyme scheme suddenly shifts, the final two lines rhyming with one another and forming a neatly paired-off couplet. In these final two lines, that internal conflict is fully laid bare. The speaker pithily turns the poem's central idea on its head, explaining that she does indeed want pity—just not in response to her external circumstances. Instead, she wants to be pitied for her own internal response, which feels to her like a failure of self-control. The speaker's previous calm in the face of heartbreak appears now to be a result of compartmentalization. She is able to separate her lover's actions from her own feelings, resenting the latter but not the former. Therefore, she locates agency solely within herself. Love is as unpredictable and uncontrollable as nature, she explains, and therefore its withdrawal cannot be treated with surprise or sadness. Ironically, while the speaker concedes that the feeling of love is capricious by nature, she is unwilling to extend that flexibility to her own feelings. She suffers from an inability to control her reactions, though she accepts that others cannot control their own feelings.
