Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love is not all, New Criticism Paper
...nces, she ought likely to be willing to trade love for life. These failings of love serve to enhance the impact of the shift in the last line, where the speaker rejects reason in favor of love. Here she announces that despite love’s limitation, she wouldn’t be willing to give it up even to save her own life. The words are handled with consummate craftsmanship, and come together to form a whole that unequivocally- works. Through her use of imagery, Millay drives home her idea by creating vividly concrete images through the power of words. By painting a picture of what love cannot prevent, what it cannot do, and what it can cause, Millay allows one to actually feel the weight of the impact love carries. The first image created in the mind of the reader is that of shelter, of a roof against the rain. “Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink/ Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain” (L 1-2). It creates the image of a rag-tag, aged, timber-frame shack deep in the greenwood being pelted by the freezing dime-sized projectile-droplets of a torrential downpour that is invitable. “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” (L 3-5). This is the image of drowning, where love does not serve as a spiritual bouy, which touches many on a very personal level. You can imagine the cruel, heartless inevitability of the struggle against nature- the idea of futilely fighting for one’s life against all odds- for it is only a matter of time before even an expert swimmer tires, and a short time at that against a mighty current. The thought is chilling of fighting to stay afloat while being driven under the ocean by wave after countless wave, fighting for breath, but missing by an instant and sucking in the salty blood of our mother Earth. Line four creates the up and down movement, the coughing and choking unprepared for the inescapable next wave as it hammers one against the nothingness of the wide-open endless sea. Drowning is not something that has to be experienced to be known, the words create our fear. The image and vision- that of death- the thickened lung, tainted blood, broken bones, and being pinned down by it is evident throughout to underline the statement that love cannot save you from your inevitable fall. “Yet many a man is making friends with death/ Even as I speak, for lack of love alone” (L 7-8) states that people do welcome death in order to live their lives free of fear, but I imagine that it is implied that these people have not found love. Millay creates the horror of war as only visualization can “being pinned down by pain and moaning for release” (L 10), I can hear bullets whizzing overhead, the ping of lead impacting steel and stone, seeing a man torn apart by the bullets of Nazi machine gunners as the ramp of the landing craft drops to Omaha beach on the morning of June 6, 1944, and knowing who is next. Without these violent, pathetic, incomprehensible- yet absolutely concrete- images, Millay wouldn’t be successful in demonstrating the impact love has on the mind- the extent to which people will sacrifice to have it. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s use of imagery and diction in Love Is Not All provide for three metaphorical themes: life versus death, love versus war, and emotion versus intellect. Millay initially focuses on the dichotomy between life and death. Love cannot provide food, nor secure shelter, nor prolong life, nor reincarnate the dead, nor cure disease, nor mend the body; nevertheless those who live without love fear not these things. Millay is ...