Love is not all (by Edna St. Vincent Millay)

The poem ‘love is not all’ brings out the complexity of love. At the first impression of the poem, it is easy to judge that the author harbors bitterness towards love, thus the view that one can get a lot of things in life without love. She argues that neither the most basic things in life nor the secondary needs require love. Further, she explains that love does not nourish the body (Millay 1), nor does it provide the important elements such as cleansing of the blood or setting the bones that are out of order (Millay 6). Love is, in this case, regarded to be of no use.

The poet employs a skeptical attitude at first, communicating to the audience about the uselessness of love. In the first line she says that love is not all (Millay 1) and takes another step to justify her doubts about love being all, by showing the audience what love cannot do for them. The poem has employed imagery. She says that love is not a floating spar to men that sink, rise and sink repeatedly (Millay 3 and 4). The image portrays a man in the sea struggling to survive, and seeing a pole at a far distance, he is unable to reach it in order to save his life. She explains that love cannot fill the thickened lungs with breath (Millay 5), a picture of a balloon without air, showing that love is not in a position to do many things that are of vital importance in survival. The poem employs a romantic language, although it is not necessarily directly between two lovers. She puts it that love is not all; not meat nor drink (Millay 1), a romantic expression in its own way. Throughout, the poem has also employed rhythm that makes it musical and interesting to the reader. Words rhyme alternately at the end of every line. She has symbolized love with death, by saying that many men are making friendship with death (Millay 7). The symbolism brings out the fact that the author cannot understand why that has to happen, even after showing the uselessness of love, bringing out more clearly her skeptical attitude towards love.

However, the author shows that love is powerful in the second half of the poem, even after showing that love is intangible at first. That is the complexity of love. Describing or understanding it is difficult, since it has such an incredible power over people. The author changes her perspective about love when she says that despite the intangibility of love, people are still falling in love. She says that lack of love make many people make friends with death (Millay 7). She describes that people might feel like dying due to broken hearts, yet when faced with pain they cannot trade the moments of love to save their bodies. In view of this, most people are illogical when it comes to love.

It is ironical that the author says that she could not give up love for the things she mentioned earlier (Millay 14), in this case she created the tension that love brings. She puts it that she might she could sell the love of the person being addressed for peace or for food when it makes her suffer pain, as if love was preventing her from getting them. After saying that she could not trade love for such needs, it makes the audience see the fact that they need love regardless of its failure to fulfill the physical needs. The author ignores her first idea of love’s ambiguity and presents the new idea of the importance of love in an oversimplified view. The poem presents the author viewing love as a blessing or a curse, although at the end of it all she shows its vitality. Everybody needs love, thus the pursuit of it. Without love most people end up suffering.

However, it is criticized that the author wrote the poem out of her frustrations in life (Vedder 560). She faced many challenges in her early years, such as love that was left unfulfilled, through a divorce in her first marriage. Her second marriage also left her with bitterness, thus her views. That was the reason she viewed love as not everything one needs to survive, and one could still fulfill the basic and secondary needs without it. Her mother was also divorced by her father and brought them up alone, which is attributed to the author’s view that love cannot give a person the necessities of life. She acknowledges the fact that despite her contempt towards love, it is still of vital importance since she received love from her mother and at one time tasted romantic love. Millay’s poem is highly personal, and she never loses sight of the great mysteries of the soul (Thesing 169).

The poem has been praised for its extraordinary use of poetic insights (Vedder 562). She has successfully used symbolism and rhythm. The poem has laid bare the mysteries in the universe, love being one among them. Through this poem, she has been able to turn her life experience into a fascinating narrative piece.

Millay’s poem has been able to play with the tension that love causes, which is the fate of all and sundry. Love is presented from a woman’s opinion, bringing the audience to view it as a natural experience that does not depend on the age of a person. Once a person loves, they can sacrifice anything for to protect that love, provided it is worth the sacrifice (Thesing 170). Contrary to many romantic poets who usually put it that love is capable of moving mountains, Millay’s poem reveals that love cannot serve as a replacement for our basic or physical needs. The poem shows that love is only of vital importance in fulfilling our emotional needs. In order to reinforce the tension brought about bygap between the blind faith in love held by many and the limitations that it has in fulfilling people’s physical needs.

In conclusion, the poem has shed light on the importance of love, which cannot be underestimated in any way. Despite the author showing the uselessness of love at first, she finally showed that love cannot be compared with anything physical, but it is necessary for emotional fulfillment. The poem has successfully employed the poetic elements such as rhyming words at the end of every line. Symbolism has also featured when the poet says that love is not a floating spar for the men who sink and rise repeatedly. The whole theme of the complexity of love has been clearly brought out, and reading the poem gives the reader a lot more meanings.

Works Cited

Millay Edna St. Vincent. Love is not all. Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Harper and Row, 1941. Print.

Thesing William. Critical essays on Edna St. Vincent (Critical essays on American literature). New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1993. Print.

Vedder Polly. World literature criticism: Kingston-Wilson. Michigan: Gale, 1997. Print.