Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all, it is not meat or 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 want 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 may well be. I do not think I would.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is sonnet #30 from Millay's sonnet sequence of 1931, titled Fatal Interview.

Part of it was quoted at the beginning of Maggie Millner's Couplets, which shows good taste... 😉

I'm off in the Internet-free zone as this appears, where I might be, I don't know, observing frogs: