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Tuesday – Valentine’s Day
Edna St. Vincent Millay makes an understated—and therefore all the more powerful—argument for love in “Sonnet XXX: Love Is Not All.” Think of it as an inversion of Arthur Maslow’s’s hierarchy of needs since Millay is unwilling to acknowledge that hunger, survival, and relief from pain are more basic than love.
Because, throughout the poem, she seems open to counterarguments, her expressed opinion in the final line that love surpasses all other needs arrives with special force. The overwhelming case against love’s supremacy is defused by the delicate assertion, “I do not think…”
There is conviction and steely determination behind that seemingly tentative statement. Here’s the poem
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 can not 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 pain 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 well may be. I do not think I would.
Happy Valentine’s Day.