Love in Sonnets Throughout the course of time people have searched for ways in order to express their love for other people. During this process poetry was discovered, and great writers began to use it as a tool to describe their own love. In the contrasting sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning “Sonnet 43” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink” they describe love in very different ways, yet have the same conclusion and desire to have love themselves. Both Browning and Millay’s sonnets are on love, and they each have the same feeling towards it, yet, they contrast each other in the ways that they express it. In Browning’s sonnet she praises love, and her tone overall is very sappy and dripping with…show more content… Each understand that love is eternal going beyond the death or live struggles. Even Browning toward the end of her sonnet realizes that true deep love is hard to hold on to as the time goes on: “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!-and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death” (Browning 13,14). No one knows what happens after death but Browning swears that if possible her love for her husband will only grow after death. The kind of love Browning believes she has is the kind of love that is unbreakable. Millay says similar sentiments in her last lines of her own sonnet. Such as: “ I might be driven to sell your love for peace, or trade the memory of this night for food. It may well be. I do not think I would” (Millay 12-14). Millay even though clearly stating even in the title of her sonnet that “love is not all” she proclaims that she will still chose it over real needs that she may have such as food or peace. Despite her needing such things, she still would give them up in sacrifice in order to preserve her love, due to her high regard for and own want for it. Both Browning and Millay desire
