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Love Is Not All By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Satisfactory Essays

The poem I have chosen to analyze is “Love is Not All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. This poem is very different from the normal romanticized love poems that we see today. In this piece, the poet portrays love as secondary to our physical needs because it is unable to sustain us, everything necessary for human survival doesn’t require love. The main idea for the majority of this poem is that love is unimportant. “Love is Not All” is a sonnet, meaning it is composed of 14 lines. Its structure takes elements from the two most typical forms of a sonnet which are Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets. The rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet is used but the turn of the poem in this structure is supposed to come after three …show more content…

The middle of the poem is centered around the fact that even though we don’t need love people will die without it. This seems to say that we are the ones who give meaning and put emphasis on love. Lines nine through eleven are the poet in a debate with herself about the importance of love. Lines twelve and thirteen are what is referred to as “the turn” in a sonnet. Here her argument changes, she goes from portraying love as completely negative to wondering whether she herself would give up love. The last line “It well may be. I do not think I would.” (13) is the resolution of the poem. Even though love doesn’t benefit us in any way physically she still would choose love over a necessity like food.
Part 2: Explication
The main idea of this poem is exactly what the title says. Love is not all, she is saying that despite how much emphasis people put on love it is secondary to our physical needs such as food, shelter, and water which will always come first.
The speaker of this poem appears to be the author herself. It’s not clear if the poem was written about anyone in particular but upon research into her personal life, I found that her parents divorced at a young age and her father wasn’t involved in her life much after that. (Gale). This event in her life relates to the cynical tone found at the beginning of the poem. Even without her father’s love she was still able to function and survive which

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