232/365/Poetry and Form

Tim and I were briefly in Rockland, Maine, last summer. I had forgotten that Edna St. Vincent Millay was born there. We had just missed the Millay Arts & Poetry Festival. We were in an art gallery, looking at paintings, and there on the wall was a copy of the sonnet that opened my wedding:

Sonnet XXX

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would. 

I found it.