Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet: Love Is Not All

The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us a simple definition of love as a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person (Merriam-Webster). We recognize that this could be romantic, filial (parent-child), or platonic love. Humans by nature have an almost innate desire to be loved but our ability to truly conceptualize it is based on personal life experience. Those experiences usually define or distort love in our eyes. Relationships, as most honest people would confess, are not easy. They are filled with good and bad times, periods of immense joy and of pain or testing. This is particularly found in romantic love, so much so that the theme, love, has been the driving force in countless movies, music, television, and literary works of art throughout all time periods, genres, and cultures. One of many famous poems that tackle this theme is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1931 published sonnet, “Love is not all.” In it the speaker expresses love in a negative but logical tone; nevertheless, concluding that although love is not all, it is

This time speaking of love’s inability to heal an individual from an internal, physical aspect. Millay argues in the following verse, “Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone” (5, 6). She implicitly asks the question, what love is good for if it can’t give me oxygen when I’m struggling to breathe or fix me when I’m broken. The poet in the second part of this quatrain almost in jest or somewhat disbelief says, “Yet [despite all the things that love cannot do] many men are making friends with death. Even as I speak for the lack of love alone” (7, 8). The poet’s speaker observes that despite the previous argument of why love is not all absence of it has led to the death of many people. Possibly a literal death as a result of suicide due to the emotional despair of being without