The Trivialization of Love in Edna St Vincent Millay's Sonnet

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink”, is a sonnet which focuses primarily, on addressing the trivialization of love. This poem expresses that love isn't the most important thing in life, but in essence, you would do anything for it. By examining how love is trivialized throughout the poem, Millay uses imagery and other literary devices to help convey the underlying messages, the speaker expresses her thoughts on falling in love through bluntly describing life’s most basic necessities, and the speaker’s transition from cynical thoughts is used to emphasize her real intentions by the end of the poem. In analyzing these factors, we can determine how love is trivialized and demonstrated through the eyes of the narrator in the poem.

There are many literary devices used in the poem to help convey specific messages. By examining examples of imagery, paradox, and metonymy, we can see that Millay illustrates her thoughts to help conclude her trivialization of love. Imagery is found mostly at the beginning of the sonnet, where the speaker goes on to explain that love isn’t one of the bare necessities of life. In Millay’s work, she uses darker tones to exemplify the importance of the practicalities, to attempt to show light to the idea of love being unnecessary. “Meat nor Drink / Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain”, Millay uses imagery to convey a dark tone to appoint love as insignificant in our everyday lives. (1-2). For example, the author points out that love cannot “fill the thickened lung with breath” (5). Breathing is one of the most important necessities for human existence; without oxygen, we all die. The narrator also states that love is unable to protect or save us from physical dangers, thus “a floating spar to men that sink / And rise and sink” (3-4). Love is also incapable to “clean the blood” or “set the fractured bone” (6). It seems as though (in the narrator’s perspective) that the hands of love are tied, preventing it from aiding us in physical ways. Metonymy is used through the word “death” in line 7, which is referred to as love. The paradox, “Yet many a man is making friends with death / Even as I speak, for lack of love alone” exemplifies that love cannot physically sustain us or save us from injury, due to the fact that it seems absurd that the “lack of love alone” drives humans to death (7-8).

Throughout the poem, the speaker expresses her feelings of love through describing life’s needs. Millay uses common images such as food, drink, and shelter to show the reader what love is incapable of doing. Additionally, love cannot take the place of “meat nor drink” (1); it is unable to quench the physical desires of hunger or thirst. Moreover, though the body may be fatigued, love cannot take the place of “slumber” or provide “a roof against the rain” (2). Evidently, love lacks the material necessities essential to survival. Our physical needs and desires cannot be extinguished by love alone. Why is love so extremely important for survival when it is not a physical need, and why does it cause so much pain?