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.

These lines open Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “Love Is Not All (Sonnet XXX).” Written in the early 20th century and published in her 1931 collection *Fatal Interview*, the poem belongs to Millay’s mature period, when she often tested romantic idealism against material necessity and emotional endurance. The speaker addresses love with a bracing realism, listing basic human needs—food, drink, sleep, shelter, rescue—that love cannot literally supply. The sonnet’s argument is deliberately unsentimental at the outset, setting up a tension between practical survival and the powerful, sometimes irrational claims love makes on the human heart.

The speaker insists that love, however exalted, cannot substitute for the essentials of life: it cannot feed, shelter, or save a drowning person. The blunt catalogue (“not meat nor drink… nor a roof… nor yet a floating spar”) demystifies love as a material solution. Yet the poem’s larger force (in the full sonnet) is not simply anti-romantic; it probes the paradox that people may still choose love even when it is “not all,” and even when reason says it should be secondary to survival. Millay dramatizes the conflict between rational self-preservation and the deep human need for attachment, meaning, and devotion.