Poetry Blog #3

Out of Chapter 7, I decided to compare Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is not all” and William Shakespeare’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Both poems, like the chapter title implies, are about love and relationships, but more specifically both are about the power of love. I chose these two poems for multiple reasons. I chose “Love is not all” quite simply because I liked it a lot out of all the poems in the chapter. After reading the rest of the poems, I thought Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, though was also about love, really looked at relationships in a different light. The use of parallelism in the poem, mainly demonstrated through the use of “nor” in each example of necessary things in life that love is not, creates very pensive tone. This poem’s theme is that although love is an intangible part of life, its value might be just as great as those tangible necessities in life, such as food, water, and shelter. At the start of the poem, there is clearly so much thought given to what love is not, readers begin to think maybe the speaker really believes love is not terribly powerful and important. There is a shift at “Yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for lack of love alone.” This shift is where readers recognize that people value love, and eventually by the last three lines, it is clear that even the speaker would not trade love for peace and food. Because the poem talks about all of these mighty and important things in life- by the end love, in an impersonal detached sense, is given the greatest value in the world. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the view of love from the very beginning was very different. For starters, the sonnet is clearly about one man’s relationship with another. Shakespeare is speaking of love in a very personal sense; it is less conceptual than Millay’s. Another difference is that Shakespeare starts his poem with imagery and visual descriptions of a woman that are all negative. Though in the end the speaker confesses that he loves his mistress, the value of love is so different. Shakespeare almost says, despite the negatives, my love is great. Millay, though in a slightly different sense, says despite all the great and necessary things in life, love is great. Both are very different and comparing them side-by-side is slightly like comparing apples and oranges but if I must, I would say the largest difference is the speaker’s journey to show the value of love. As I wrote about a little bit at the beginning of this post, I chose the Millay because I liked it a lot and it spoke to me a little bit more than the sonnet mainly because I really liked the poetic style and slight indecision on part of the speaker at the end of the poem. The speaker in the end says she (or he it is not clear) does not think they would trade love for food or peace, but the way it is written leaves some room for doubt. I think this is a really thoughtful choice compared to outright saying “I would or wouldn’t do it.” It is for these reasons it spoke to me a bit more.