Sonnet

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—
I shall have only good to say of you.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I love the wild and wonderful things Millay does with a sonnet. She can make them flow so smooth and rhythmically, almost like a prose poem or ordinary conversation. Not even Shakespeare quite manages that, but then he's stuck with his Elizabethan thees and thous and dost and whatnot, so he has a harder time of it.