"Love is not all" Love Poetry Blog Post Emily Salamanca

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 can not 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 pain 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 well may be. I do not think I would. '

-Edna St. Vincent Millay [1931]



Millay implements a sonnet form in order to draw upon Shakespeare and his love sonnets, however, unlike Shakespeare, she begins by defining what love is not, rather than what love is. To Millay, love is not a physically necessary material. One can not reach for love like one can reach for a glass of water or a soft pillow. Yet, love is necessary. For the first six lines, Millay describes what love can not do and can not be. Then, in line seven, she provides a contrast. "Yet many a man is making friends with death / Even as I speak, for lack of love alone." In this, she says that without love, there is only death to be friend with. Death, being the end of life, is the only opportunity to escape love. Thus, love is life and life is love. In the following line, Millay gives a hypothetical of what would happen if she found herself breaking away from love. "Pinned down by pain and moaning for release," has an obvious sexual tone, showing that death and/or hatred, rather than love, has taken over her full body. Then, she directly addresses her lover and says, "I might be driven to sell your love for peace," thus indicating a rocky relationship that is riddled with both love and hatred. Finally, in the volta of the poem, she admits that in this scenario, she might trade necessary spiritual love for necessary physical nourishment, but then tells us that she would not. Love is more important to her than excess food. Love fills her in a way physical things can not.

I do not have the same experience as Millay, but I would certainly put love before excess in my life. She seems to have her head on straight with love as she admits that it would be a hard decision choosing between love and physical well being, but I think in general, I would tend to put love before myself. As a human being, it is not easy to not always think of myself before others, but I consciously try to put others first. This is my best attempt at the love of which Millay writes.


Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Love is Not All” (Sonnet XXX)," from Collected Poems. Copyright 1931, 1934, 1939, © 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis.