The theme of love has been widely explored inn the literature work throughout history. However, the approaches that describe or expresses what all love is has taken different perspectives, with some of authors having more or less same way of expression while others approaches in a unique way quite different from that of others. The artistic work of Millay and Elizabeth was not an exception, but the two showed certain similarities and differences. First and foremost, their works describing love appears to be great and unprecedented by other poetic works.
Millay and Elizabeth had love as the main subject in their work. In the close look of the works’ titles, the message which the writers tries to pass over to the audience is closely related in their meaning. At the first, the reader of Millay work would get the expression of quantifying love. In other word, Millay is grappling to understanding the magnitude of love, thus, she asserts that “ love is not all” (Millay) . This further portrays love as an ordinary product like any other products that has got no great significance in the society. According to Millay “ love is not all” it is used to implies that love does not give, sustain or even prolong one’s life. Moreover, it does not provide the basics of life which means love cannot be food, water or even the air necessary for the body functioning. This implied that a person’s love cn be retrieved from anywhere or be given to anybody. She depicts how insignificance love may be when she states that love has no power to redeem/rescue a drowning man. While holding more strongly on the biological factors, Millay unveils that love entails mainly emotional feeling that defeats all the other body controls. It’s the body feeling that subdues the body and scares every other force away.
On the other hand, Elizabeth endeavors to express the way she shows her love to the love partner. She disputes the idea that love is arbitrary as held by Millay, but instead she believes on love of specific. As she commences her poem, she asks “ how do I love thee? (Browning). This question is an indication of love for a particular thing, but not all things. She was not born to love everything. Elizabeth believes that love is unlimited as it may apply to Millay. When one loves, it means to showing of total love to the loved ones in all dimensions. For instance, Elizabeth says that she loved thee to the depth, breath and height. This implies that she liked all that belonged to the loved. Love is therefore indiscriminative of anything but entails whatever the partner possesses.
Love can be demonstrated in its fullness through spiritual part of a person rather than in the body feeling. The love of feeling is shut from penetrating certain boundaries, which the spiritual love goes through without obstruction. The spiritual love is like a magnetic wave, which travels through the air and causes an impact on object without being noticed. This power was seen in Elizabeth love as she says that her soul can reach at times when the sight of feelings is obscured (Browning). Pure love is much more than just the sharing of food, drinks and the rest as Millay might have put it. It is the spiritual love which can be shown on daily basis rather than the love which may be falsified on emotional feelings. The most surprising thing is that, the spiritual love does not fade away when feelings of smiles, fears and others are no longer there after the body is deprived off its soul, but there remains spiritual loved which means is eternal.
Although love has been from generation to generation, the past generations of our forefathers showed the meaning of love better than the neo-modern generation. I believed that they had emotional feeling as well as spiritual consciences were well equated with each other than in the present generation. Looking at the present generation, it’s overt that many families are semi-permanent, and incidents of commercial sex and multiple love partners have proliferated than ever before only to satisfy the body pleasures/ motional feelings. Generally, there is little of Elizabeth’s spiritual love which is shown in the society, but the society has embraced the Millay type of love which though important may be dropped arbitrary.