If ever I said, in grief or pride,
I tired of honest things, I lied.

In two clipped rhyming lines, Millay frames a vow of fidelity to “honest things”—plain truths, sincere feeling, and unvarnished living—against the temptations of mood and ego. The speaker admits that grief can sour one’s appetite for candor and that pride can make sincerity seem beneath one’s dignity; yet both states are treated as distortions. The blunt final clause, “I lied,” functions as a self-correction: any claim to have outgrown honesty is not a sophisticated insight but a betrayal of one’s better knowledge. The couplet’s moral force lies in its refusal to romanticize cynicism, insisting that weariness with truth is itself a kind of falsehood.