Sonnet: Love Is Not All
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
Commentary
My thanks are due to Rajat Sharma for introducing me to this poem:
“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
– Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”
I read Bradbury’s classic cautionary tale long before I had even heard of Millay, but I assumed (given the august company she was placed in) that she was a writer of note. Unfortunately, the first few poems of hers that I came across were remarkably unremarkable, and so I added Millay to my list of Poets Whom Other People Like.
That categorization has changed, though, and I think it was today’s poem which changed it. The tinge of desperation that colours even her most romantic offerings is present, of course, but there’s something else as well: a compression of thought and word and deed, a concentration reminiscent of no one so much as the early Dylan Thomas. The relentless flow of metaphors in the opening three lines, the density of syllables in the wonderful third couplet, the desolation of the sestet - they’re all handled with consummate craftsmanship, and they come together to form a whole that unequivocally works.
The twist right at the end is typical. The lines preceding it are dark, yes, but where some writers would have been cynical, Millay’s tone is one of experience refined by sorrow. She knows first-hand what love can and cannot do, and that knowledge makes her final, defiant affirmation of its importance all the more poignant and powerful. Love is not everything, but it does not need to be; what it is, is enough.
— Thomas
Minstrels Links
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Poem #34, First Fig
Poem #49, The Unexplorer
Poem #108, The Penitent
Poem #317, Inland
Poem #590, Sonnet XLIII
Poem #604, Euclid Alone Has Looked On Beauty Bare
Poem #817, Grown-up
Walt Whitman:
Poem #54, When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Poem #157, O Captain! My Captain!
Poem #268, The Dalliance of the Eagles
Poem #246, I Hear America Singing
Poem #445, A Noiseless Patient Spider
Poem #498, The World Below the Brine
Poem #508, I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
SFX106 · 10 October 2002
great poem
sandi_ordinario · 24 April 2003
Hi,
This is Millay’s take on love. She is trying to be practical in so many lines on what love is NOT. In essence she is saying love cannot fulfill the basic necessities of life like food, housing. Neither can it be a spiritual buoy for the lost and sinking which of course I tend to disagree. According to her, Love cannot also heal or alleviate bodily diseases or discomfort although some men would rather consider death than live without love. After these contemplative considerations, Edna starts to reason out what possible things might make her compromise her love. Certain things such as being “pinned down by need, moaning for release (gasping for air could be another way to describe it)” or succumbing to want (temptation, perhaps) beyond her powers to resist. She might give up love for peace, or exchange the memory of what she and her lover had just experienced for some physical necessity and yet…maybe not at all. The last line gives love’s lasting attributes examined under the harsh light of reality some hope.
Sandi
CYNTRIGGS · 27 September 2003
ITSUCKS!!!!!!
clark2tc · 17 October 2005
Accuracy is important! Line #10 should read:
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Line #14 should read: It well may be. I do not think I would.
C. Clark
Ben Belser · 7 November 2006
about your comment on love as a spiritual buoy in “love is not all”– edna st. vincent millay is not saying that love is not a spiritual support. far from it. like the other lines before this one, she is merely pointing out that it will not save the life of a drowning man. that is, just as it can’t give you food or water or shelter, it can’t keep you alive in other terrestrial ways either.
in fact, the poem continually hints at the fact that, if it has any meaning at all, love is spiritual or extra-terrestrial altogether– that it floats above the bedrock necessities.
ben
Nachum35 · 3 January 2007
This has been one of my favorite poems since I first read it as a teenager. I always imagined it to be some older and wiser persons explanation to someone my age on the danger in pinning all of ones hopes on love, and also on the joys and terrible agony of giving ones self over to it.
Aaron L. Miller
Tandy Cronyn · 2 April 2007
You have a misprint in the text of the Millay sonnet, “Love is not all” posted on your website. The last line has inverted two words: it should read “It well may be” , rather than “it may well be”.
Tandy Cronyn
Derik Ha · 13 May 2008
Lick it, “Love is Not All”!!!!!!!!!!!
How do you like them limons!!!!!
< I’m Rick James, BIIIIOOOOTCH!!!!!!!!!!!!>