Love is Nothing and Everything

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Love is Nothing and Everything Edna St.Vincent Millay’s sonnet, “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink” opens with a somber description of what love is not and gives the reader the impression that Millay may have some bitter feelings about love. Nevertheless, in the final stanza it becomes evident that this in not a theoretical discussion of generic love. Millay’s reference to “your love” (12) and “this night” (13) adds intimacy and immediacy. There is now reference to a person and a time and the reader is witness to Millay’s personal musings in the throes of passion. Millay uses repetition to assure the reader that love cannot fulfill the most basic needs of life by stating, “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink / Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain” (1-2). Love cannot satisfy your need for food and water, rejuvenate an exhausted man, or give you physical shelter in a storm. The deficiencies of love continue to be expressed and a rhythmical pattern is introduced in the following lines, “Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again” (3-4). This gives the reader a feeling of bobbing about hopelessly on the sea. Certainly, love alone cannot save a drowning man. Moreover, Millay contends that love cannot restore one’s physical health by stating, “love can not fill the thickened lung with breath / nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone” (5-6). The inadequacy of love is evident when juxtaposed with our basic needs for survival. Nevertheless, for all the things love cannot provide, we still must have love. Millay expresses the need for love when she says, “Yet many a man is making friends with death /even as I speak, for lack of love alone” (7-8). Here it is evident that even though we do not physically require love to survive; life is not worth living without love. The first half of this poem

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