Love, or it's the Intention of Love, is Almost Never Clear

Love is messy and tricky and often times cumbersome. If it weren't, there wouldn't be hundreds upon thousands of poems dedicated to the notion. However, to borrow a line from Moulin Rouge "love is a many splendid thing" as well. For that reason, humanity's collection of love poems, and poems disregarding love or revering it, keeps on growing.

The two poems I chose to contrast were John Donne's "The Flea" and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all." Donne compares love to the bite of a flea in his poem -- the speaker points out a flea that his bitten both him and his lover. He makes a rather blunt assumption that since their blood is mixing inside the bug, and that no one would consider that sinful, then why should they not swap fluids in bed? Further, once the lover tries to squelch the flea, the narrator ascertains that if she were to kill the bug she would also be killing their (metaphorical) marriage since that is what the bug symbolizes for him. She kills the flea. However he's a wily feller and he twists this new outcome and tells her 'look, the bug is dead. but you however or not - thus us swapping fluids isn't that detrimental to your honor.' In honor, he wants their love to manifest in the physical sense, and he is not beating around the bush to make that clear to her.

In contrast, Millay's poem begins promptly with the repetition of her title - "love is not all" - fooling her audience to think she is quite serious in making the statement that love is not as important as other aspects of life. She claims love is not above meat or drink, or slumber, breath, or blood. She is firm in her stance that love should not be placed above over qualities and aspects of life -- that is, until she isn't. In the ninth line, her tone shifts; now she paints a story of difficulty, and pain and moaning, a time in which she "do[es] not think [she] would ... be drive to sell your love for peace" or "trade the memory of this night for food." Thus, she goes back on her definition of what love is not -- yet it is in this juxtaposition that the true purpose of her sonnet emerges.

The two authors have two contrasting attitudes towards love, although that may be difficult to see from the very beginning of their poems. Funnily enough, it seems as if Dunne is more invested in the idea of love that Millay is from comparing the beginning of their two poems when in fact, it is the opposite. Beneath Dunne's flowering diction lies his true motive in which all he desires from his lover (or at least so it seems) is the physical act of love. However, Millay, who may seem apathetic towards love in the beginning by claiming all the things love is not, is the author more driven towards accepting love in all of its forms. Although she claims love cannot replace sustenance such as food and air, it is a sustenance of a different kind, one that cannot be replaced by anything else, and one that, in its absence, demonstrates just how powerful of an impact it can have.