Analysis Of Love Are Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink

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Essay #2 “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink”
Love can be described multiple ways with different people. Some describe love in a positive way and even in a negative way. In the poem “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, she compared love to nature. She emphasizes that love can and cannot do certain things. Edna expresses how she feels about love by using repetition, symbolism, and imagery.
Immediately when reading the poem “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink”, you notice the repetition standing out. Edna seemed to think that you can’t survive on love by itself. Repetition is very well in this poem, especially in lines 2, 3, and 6. “Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain” ( Vincent Millay 2). “Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink” (Vincent Millay 3). “Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;”( Vincent Millay 6). These three lines repeat the word “nor” five times emphasizing that love cannot level up to our physical needs. While reading you may ask why can’t love level up to our physical needs? For example, someone you love is on life support right now there is nothing that you can do to save them,
Imagery is shown to be mostly what can be touched. For instance “Pinned down by pain and moaning for release” (Vincent Millay 10). These words substantiate an example of auditory imagery also, where Edna shows our readers the desperation of her love life and the suffering one may go through but still not trade love for freedom. Another example of words is “slumber”, “thickened lung”, and “fractured bone”. Those words are very disturbing not sentimental at all. They showed the pain that she felt in the bad days of her relationship. In the second stanza she then shows that love cannot heal you physically, but emotionally love can cause people to commit suicide. As you can see without imagery we wouldn’t be able to feel the way Edna felt

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