Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo" is a poem initially published in Poetry magazine in May 1919. It was subsequently republished as part of her 1922 collection A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets. Millay was inspired to write the poem after a real-life trip to Staten Island she made with Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva. It is almost certain that she decided to give the work a title that is the Spanish translation of "a recollection of memory" as a tribute to her fellow poet whose works were published in his native language.
The poem has several notable aspects to it aside from sporting a Spanish title for no reason hinted at within the text itself. Each of the three stanzas begins with the exact same line in an example of the literary device known as anaphora. "We were very tired, we were very merry— / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry." Although telling a story of two people spending the night together having simple fun in the outdoors, the participants are not described in any way that would identify them. They are simply the collective "we" and are not even distinguished as individuals making up that "we" except for a reference to which one likes pears and one who prefers apples. This wholesale lack of individuation within the text is the point.
The focus of the narrative on simple and affordable pleasures climaxing in the closing stanza in which the two characters divest themselves of every possession, but their clothes and subway fare ultimately serves to create a dimension which allows for flexible interpretation. It is the universality of the experience and the ambiguity of the participants which makes "Recuerdo" especially useful for lessons in poetic interpretation. When the historical background of actual events from the poet's life is added, the potential for interpretative flexibility becomes even broader.
Just one example of this elasticity of meaning, for instance, is how the poem was initially greeted. Because the two people in the poem do spend the entire night together–though without any allusion at all to a sexual union–it was interpreted as a celebration of sexual freedom for women. This interpretation made the poem controversial in its time despite the fact that there is no identification of the gender—even at the pronoun level—of either character.
