Sonnet

Love Is Not All

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

and rise and sink and rise and sink again.

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

pinned down by need and moaning for release

or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.

This sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to be a modified Petrarchan sonnet. Although Millay does not maintain the eight lines/turn/six lines format, it is most similar to the Petrarchan form going with six lines/turn/ eight lines. The shift in tone becomes evident at the beginning of the seventh line where Millay starts with, “yet many a man is making friends with death/ even as I speak, for lack of love alone.” At the beginning of the poem, the poet appears to be disturbed by the importance people put into “love” and criticizes that “Love is not all. “ After the volta, Millay seems to begin to question why that is, why it is that so many long for it. She now begins to use more personal pronouns, like “I” and “you.” It becomes more personal, more real for both the speaker and the reader. This particular form allows for Millay’s sentiments about love to come off in a more natural way. It gets the point across, making the reader aware but at the same time creates a mellow mindset in the reader.