All You Need Is Love, Essay Example

Love permeates every culture on the earth and is woven in the history of mankind through verse, poetry, music, art and historical events. The Taj Mahal was built to the honor of love; Napoleon used a war ship to bring rose plants to Josephine and his enemies permitted passage of the ship, as they carried the roses of love. However, it is poetry that stands out as the common denominator of mankind’s expression of love above all. Poetry with the theme of love is recorded in songs, greeting cards and the love letter we may hold dear to our heart stowed away in our precious keepsakes. In their poetry, William Shakespeare and Edna St. Vincent Millay both express mankind’s universal need for love and its value even with its shortcomings and faults.

“Love is Not All: It is Not Meat nor Drink” by Millay, expresses everything love is not; the reader may think that the author is writing a mockery of love, or perhaps finds it cynical. However, as we move through the poem, a deeper message unfolds. The author is feeling bad about love and enumerates everything that seems to be similar to love as people have thought of it, and worshipped it in verses. Millay clearly disposes that natural, obvious truths about the absence of miracle in the feeling of love, saying that “Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath/ Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone” (5-6).

She is perfectly right because she looks at love from a practical point of view – she just tries to despise the grand, even mysterious meaning that people have attributed to love, enchanting it and raising it to the level of sacredness. Millay’s thought is absolutely reasonable – even more, it is too logical and pragmatic to be understood by the one who has ever experienced the feeling of true love. When people fall in love, they really believe that it is the universal cure from all diseases; it is the savior from all troubles and problems.

Thus, Millay shows that in reality the life often creates such situations in which love is absolutely helpless – there are hundreds of such examples. Romeo and Juliet died because of the misunderstanding and warlike intentions of their families, the inability to overcome prejudice that has been nurtured for centuries and finally killed people whose love remained eternal in the lines of Shakespeare. Another example of helplessness of love is the great work Titanic –the final dramatic episode in which James Dawson remains in the ice-cold water for the sake of his beloved, Rose DeWitt Bukater, to stay alive, speaks for the grandeur of the feeling of love; their love does not save him from freezing to death. This is sad but true, and Millay clearly states this in her work.

One can trace this thought of Millay at the beginning of the verse – she states that love cannot be everything in the human life as it cannot feed or heel the person; but further on she confesses that the only reason for which she speaks so is not her cynical attitude to love and disrespect of this feeling: “Even as I speak, for lack of love alone” (8). This way, everyone can see that the scream of the author’s soul is for love and not against it – she wants to feel it and does not know what it is, this is why she ponders over why this feeling makes people go mad, commit deeds or greatest atrocities, kill others or create the works of art.

The final part of the verse proves that in fact the author does not feel bad about love at all – on the contrary, she tries to think of the situations in which she might refuse from love and does not find any of them:

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
…I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food (9-13).

Coming to these lines, the reader is misled by the sorrows and hardships Millay describes, because taking into consideration all her practical evaluations of love, it is rational to refuse from love to feel good. But the end of the verse brings about the unexpected ending – Millay says: “It well may be. I do not think I would” (14). Starting with the material thoughts of what use love may bring and how it can help a person in need in a practical sense, and not finding any ways, Millay is likely to arrive at the conclusion that love is not needed at all. But even describing the worst tortures, the moment of the strongest need that a human can ever experience, Edna S. Vincent Millay still concludes that it is impossible to sacrifice the feeling of love for the sake of savior or material welfare of any kind.

Such a conclusion speaks more eloquently than any praise of love, and Millay praises this unique feeling much more gently and powerfully than any person would do, no matter how many positive epithets and comparisons he or she may compose. The unique preciousness of love, as expressed by Millay, is that she would not refuse from love for the sake of anything in the world, even “pinned down by pain and moaning for release” (10), and the verse really represents a wonderful appreciation of love – it is skillful and poetic, artistic in form and powerful in its simplicity.

In another verse, the one of Shakespeare, love is personified in contrast to the one of Millay. His sonnet “My Mistress’s Eyes are Nothing like the Sun” is devoted to the woman who Shakespeare loves. It does not matter whether it was a particular woman who really existed in the life of Shakespeare or it was a collective image of a beloved woman; but what is clear is that the classic poet of the Middle Ages also compared the feeling of love with some practical things – the works of art, music, nature etc.

Shakespeare’s comparison is substantially different from the one of Millay’s because of the essence of comparison; while Millay thinks of certain earthly things that may make her refuse from love for the sake of living, Shakespeare compares his beloved woman with the most beautiful things the humankind or nature has created. Surely, he comes to a conclusion that nature and art are more beautiful and grand the humane things, and the reader at first may realize that Shakespeare tries to find something outstanding in his mistress and fails to do that.

However, even thinking that the comparison fails and diminishes the beauty of the woman who Shakespeare is in love with, along with reading and understanding the shades of meaning concealed in the work, one can see how mistaking the initial impression may appear – the conclusion at which Shakespeare arrives is that the comparison he has initiated is basically wrong: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ As any she belied with false compare” (13-14).

Shakespeare does not come to a conclusion that his mistress is a woman who does not possess any outstanding qualities, more than that, he does not even try to conceal the fact that he does not worship her or elevate her qualities – he objectively tries to find the comparison in which she would win: “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun/ If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head” (Shakespeare).

Continuing the comparison, Shakespeare tries to find the beauty similar to the one of roses in his mistress: “I have seen roses damasked, red and white/ But no such roses see I in her cheeks” (5-6). The reason for such choice may be explained by the famous, over-used comparison of women with flowers, their qualities, smell or texture. So Shakespeare objectively tries to find something in common a woman and a beautiful flower may have, and concludes that they have no similarities. Again, he understands that she is only a woman and she cannot compete in beauty with the nature, which is ideal in origin.

Further on, Shakespeare still confesses that there is something he admires in his mistress when he says “I love to hear her speak” (9), but at the same time he disenchants this opinion of his, juxtaposing it with an objective, yet not very flattering truth for his mistress: “yet well I know/That music hath a far more pleasing sound” (9-10). Hence, one can see that William Shakespeare’s mistress fails the comparison in all points, and the ending of the poem, as well as the Millay’s one, may acquire a reasonable ending – the disappointment in love and understanding that there is nothing outstanding and unusual about this feeling or its objects.

But the result is completely different, which adds charm and power to the verse. Shakespeare realizes that this woman is beyond all comparisons. Even taking into consideration the grandeur of art and the beauty of nature, one can hardly object to the fact that they are something different from the image created by a person in love. Nature and art are something separate from the world of inner feelings of the person; when someone looks at the shockingly beautiful dawn, he or she can explain their feelings that arise from the aesthetic appreciation of beauty. When one looks at the eternal work of art, it is also possible to justify the emotions that work arises because of the aesthetic value of art that has been long ago recognized by the humankind.

The situation with love is completely different – as a famous German philosopher Feuerbach states, people love not for something, but in spite of something. As soon as we understand for what we love and worship a person, we stop loving him or her. For this reason Shakespeare understood that even the most beautiful things in the world cannot be even compared with the feelings he has to his beloved woman, and Millay understood that she would never exchange love for anything. Human beings are used to rationalizing everything; however, the more they try to rationalize love, the more they understand that it is impossible.

Works Cited

Millay, Edna S. Vincent. ‘Love is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink’.  Living Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. John Brereton. United States: Pearson and Longman, 2007, 790.

Shakespeare, William. Sonnet CXXX: My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun. The Oxford Shakespeare: Poems, 1914.