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.
Other love poems here on Moss Kingdom: Love is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Paper Hearts, Les Bijoux by Charles Baudelaire (translated by Jacques LeClercq), A Seduction: in Four Seasons, La Petite Mort: a breath of agony, Sonnet 28 from “14 Lines”, Elegy 20 To His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne, Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae by Ernest Dowson, Roll On Columbia: a sonnet for our tenth anniversary.