Love Is Not All -- Essay

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Additionally, the power of this poem is that it is universal; rather than being about two specific lovers, it is about romance and indirect -- the trials and tribulations of what lovers might expect: "Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink." Directly after this we are given to a wild oceanic storm, and can picture a man in the sea who is desperately struggling to survive against the dramatic power of nature. As the waves take him down and he struggles to grab hold of something tangible, all he things of is love. "Nor yet a floating spar to men than sink, And rise and sink again." Is love a blessing, or is love a curse? It is both -- it is neither.

Word choice is important in this poem to tell the reader that if one must define love only in the logical, one will fail. Millay expertly does this for us by using terms that are practical in nature, and part of our entire hierarchy of being:

Love does not:

Allow us to sustain our bodies -> meat or drink

Allow us shelter from the elements -> roof against the rain

Allow us a life-preserving object -> floating spar

Allow us air -> thickened lungs

Allow us rest -> slumber

Allow us to heal a wound -> Clean our blood or set a fracture bone

We might then ask -- why does love exist. In this poem, the drama increases as the phrases become more and more serious in tone and timbre -- and finally we get to the battle between death and love with a crescendo that shouts, "Humans need love, regardless of how useless it seems.

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" Knowing a bit about Millay as a romantic, and knowing that poets and authors tend to think in the abstract, it is especially clever that Millay takes the reader through a number of quite logical reasons why love is useless -- perhaps on the physical level, but then turns and gives us a straw man argument -- and shows us how useless her rhetoric about logic truly remains. Additionally, the love Millay speaks of is a love that transcends the physical, but is, for all intents and purposes, sustenance itself.

In another way, the poem seems like a journey: if one pictures a wise guru being asked, "Master, what is love?" -- then slowly, as if teaching children, the guru tells the student all the things that love is not, pauses, and then logically says, "ah, but the lack of love causes death." Then continues the story to allow the student to see that there are many things that may not be defined by tactical or logical words or concepts, yet that never diminishes their importance. For Millay, love is the reason to live -- and she reminds us why this remains a universal construct.

REFERFENCES

St. Vincent Millay, E. (2008). Selected….....

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