At first glance, Ms. Millay's poem appears to be about a woman craving a sexual experience, an eagerness of which she attempts to convey to her addressee (the lover) through a combination of coyness (lines 2 - 4, note the willingness which may be pretend) and passionate--almost masculine--desire (lines 4, note "zest", line 7).
A more careful reading--which many feminists find upsetting--is one of pure desire, where the speaker, so desirous of sexual experience (perhaps from suppression, a condition of many women of the period when demanded to adhere to strict moral chastity not observed by 20th century men) that she willingly throws off personal dignity (note lines 1, 2, 5, etc where the speaker willingly objectifies her body) for intercourse (line 8, "possessed").
My personal reading of the poem is a double irony, or a deliberate irony on a preexisting irony. The first or preexisting irony is the most obvious, viz., an apparently respectable modern woman sacrifices feminist gains, i.e., the obtained dignity of her sex through the recent gains of the Suffrage movement for a fling. The second, most important irony is Ms. Millay's deliberate juxtaposition of feminine values and passions in order to provide a modern criticism of the sonnet form's historical treatment of women. While it may appear obvious that the poem's speaker wishes only for a sexual experience, her apparent willingness is forced by Millay not to convey a supposed base nature in women, but to serve as the basis for a criticism of Petrarchan, Wyattian, Shakespearean, and Spenserian sonneteering.
Typically, one would read many sonnets as the male chasing/admiring his object of desire who remains elusive, the sonnet produced by such sexual yearning the only "satisfaction" he can afford in his written "chase." Millay takes this sexual and relational unfulfillment by conveying inherently male traits on a women, not to objectify her but to scrutinize men through the absurdity of a women possessing (no pun intended) masculine sonnet traits.
Hence, the poem's double irony comes from a woman acting masculine with he passions by which Millay clarifies her real irony, viz., that uninhibited sexual passion has consequences and makes fools of men, who in their quests misunderstand women by turning them into sexual beasts like themselves. Note in the sestet that Millay writes "my staggering brain" (perhaps a reference to orgasmic experience) will not "remember you." A very powerful reminder that sexual intimacy does not equal the often very obvious exertions of the masculine sonnet-chase of the woman. As science has empirically proven, the sex-act is brief in a very literal sense, while the composition of the sonnet takes far more effort in both a literary and physical sense. In other words, the sex hoped to be gotten through the writing of the sonnet is, to Millay's speaker, a very unfulfilling recompense for the sonnet's pains.
I was intrigued by your reading and I definitely see the irony she may have been conveying with this piece. I feel like she is challenging convention in that considering the fact that there weren't a lot of female poets during this time period much less women speaking publicly in these terms she in a way is making fun of convention. She writes the sonnet in a conventional sonnet form in regards to meter but breaks all convention by creating a parody of some sort of these traditional sonnets with daring subject matter to her almost damsel in distress type tone to ultimately her very assertive tone. Great Stuff.
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