“Possession”

Mahlon Leonard Fisher, an architect who found his way to poetry, founded this small literary journal, The Sonnet, in 1917. Each issue contained only four sonnets, and this one featured Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Possession.” Kimiko Hahn’s “Contrapuntal Opening with a Line from Millay” takes inspiration from Millay’s poem “Witch-Wife.” “Witch-Wife” ends with the line “she never will be all mine,” and “Possession” concludes with a similar sense of longing: “I want you back—I want you for my own!”