The Night Sky (Symbol)
The poem opens with an image of the sky following the sunset, which symbolizes both the inevitability of change and the sadness that can follow it anyway. Rather than evoke the night sky directly, St. Vincent Millay simply references the absence of light by describing a sky without "the light of day." Therefore, she suggests that her state is one of blankness or of being bereft. At the same time, the routine nature of the sun's setting and the night's arrival is used to emphasize the routineness of the speaker's experience. These two aspects of the night sky image converge to symbolize the speaker's feelings of empty sadness following an ordinary experience.
The Tides (Symbol)
Much like the aforementioned image of the night sky, the cyclical tides symbolize the inevitability of change. However, like the image of the night sky, this image is multifaceted in its symbolic connotations—all the more clearly because Millay mentions tides twice, highlighting different aspects of the image each time. Her first mention of tides is less vivid and merely mentions the fact that they can ebb, much like love. The second mention of tides personifies them as powerful, almost willful forces capable of creating destruction. Thus, tides here are a symbol of the destruction that the speaker's lover has left in his wake. More broadly, they symbolize the potentially destructive effects of even the most normal and unavoidable events.
Nature (Motif)
The poem features a range of symbolically charged images of the natural world, collectively making nature itself the most noticeable motif in this work. The speaker uses the recurring change that is present in the natural world as evidence for the normalcy of change in feelings and relationships. She argues that, since everything from the moon to the seasons is subject to cyclical changes, her lover's feelings must be too. The nature motif seems to unintentionally reveal two things about the speaker's state of mind. Firstly, since the speaker focuses on natural processes that are cyclical, she hints that her lover's feelings may also be cyclical and thus that he may love her again one day. Secondly, by describing increasingly active and frightening natural phenomena, the speaker suggests that her lover's rejection has had a strong negative effect on her despite her being prepared for its occurrence.
