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. Edna 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” (Millay).

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. She tries to diminish its meaning by explaining that a person who poses much power on love is really helpless against some simple down-to-earth troubles and cannot be protected by this feeling.

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. But in fact it is not so, and the feeling of security comes from the inside – we do not realize the true reality and live in dreams, hopes and feelings created and distorted in our mind.

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. Still, even being madly in love with each other, Romeo and Juliet did not manage to help their feeling flourish and died for its sake, which in itself was a great drama.

Another example of helplessness of love is the great work Titanic – the film by James Cameron about love and sacrifice on the background of an outstanding event of the 20^th century touched the hearts of millions and made them understand how much this grand feeling can change in the human lives. But 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; their love does not save him from freezing to death. This is sad but true, and Millay clearly states this in her work.

From the beginning of the verse Millay 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” (Millay). 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.