Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All” employs numerous poetic devices in order to express the simultaneous senselessness and essentiality of love. Structurally, Millay’s sonnet fits perfectly into Shakespeare’s niche: the first 13 lines express the superfluity and foolishness of being in love, while the last line confesses that Millay does “not think [she] would” (Line 14) surrender love for purpose. This single closing statement encompasses the human tendency to love for the experience, not for the usefulness, which is contrary to everything the rest of the poem was leading to. This is intentional, however. In order to establish why people love, the poem must first have every reason to say why they should not. Millay’s repetitive
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In contrast to the definite “nots” and “nors” heavily used in the beginning, Millay transitions into rather ambiguous wording, starting both lines 9 and 14 with “it well may be”, or “I might” (12). This signals that Millay may have never been completely opposed to love in the beginning, but rather just hesitant. The change in the definitiveness of the diction becomes a turning point where Millay opens herself to the idea of possibly embracing …show more content…
It is here that Millay establishes that she has experienced love and is directly speaking to somebody who hurt her as a result of her vesting her trust in this person. Instead of hypothetically speaking of the experience of other’s heartbreak, Millay alludes to her own, and how desperately she wanted to swear off love due to the pain she experienced “in a difficult hour” (9) as she was “pinned down”, “moaning”, and “nagged”, (10-11) none of which present a positive connotation of her memory of love. She returns to the logic of favoring necessities in order to rid her of those memories. Millay’s diction as she threatens to “sell your love for peace” (12) diminishes her lover’s efforts into nothing more than a transaction in order to eliminate strife. With “sell” being the key word that devalues love so much, one would assume that her equating it to a palpable item rather than a unique human experience means that she truly has no desire to love. The same runs true for Millay wanting to “trade the memory of this night for food” (13). While food is a necessity, it doesn’t have the capacity to last nearly as long as love, and this acts as an insult to her love, to assume that her
In contrast to the definite “nots” and “nors” heavily used in the beginning, Millay transitions into rather ambiguous wording, starting both lines 9 and 14 with “it well may be”, or “I might” (12). This signals that Millay may have never been completely opposed to love in the beginning, but rather just hesitant. The change in the definitiveness of the diction becomes a turning point where Millay opens herself to the idea of possibly embracing …show more content…
It is here that Millay establishes that she has experienced love and is directly speaking to somebody who hurt her as a result of her vesting her trust in this person. Instead of hypothetically speaking of the experience of other’s heartbreak, Millay alludes to her own, and how desperately she wanted to swear off love due to the pain she experienced “in a difficult hour” (9) as she was “pinned down”, “moaning”, and “nagged”, (10-11) none of which present a positive connotation of her memory of love. She returns to the logic of favoring necessities in order to rid her of those memories. Millay’s diction as she threatens to “sell your love for peace” (12) diminishes her lover’s efforts into nothing more than a transaction in order to eliminate strife. With “sell” being the key word that devalues love so much, one would assume that her equating it to a palpable item rather than a unique human experience means that she truly has no desire to love. The same runs true for Millay wanting to “trade the memory of this night for food” (13). While food is a necessity, it doesn’t have the capacity to last nearly as long as love, and this acts as an insult to her love, to assume that her