More to Life than Love

In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnet XXX, she contemplates how necessary is love actually is in people’s lives. She begins her sonnet by stating that “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain” (Millay lns 1-2), saying that love cannot provide the three basic human necessities of food, water, and shelter, emphasizing them through iambic pentameter. But this is an obvious statement that the emotion of love, cannot provide these physical things. The rest of the poem states similar obvious facts, like love cannot heal broken bones, in an attempt to show the facts about what love really is, thinking that men and women have been blinding in their quests to feel loved. There is more to life than loving one person and being with them for the rest of your life.