Compare and Contrast Essay on "since Feeling Is First" and "love Is Not All"

COMPARE AND CONTRAST ESSAY

Poetry is a tool used to express the poets’ innermost thoughts and feelings. The poems discussed in this essay are about one of the most powerful and complex emotions of all, love. The chosen two poems are the following; “Since Feeling Is First” by E. E. Cummings and “Love Is Not All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. While these two poems share the same topic, the themes presented in each poem varies slightly.

Love has no logic. That is the theme of the poem “ Since Feeling Is First.” Even the title itself is quite an indication as to what E. E. Cummings has written about in his poem. At a first glance, it is visible that the poem does not follow any kind of structure or syntax. Upon reading the poem, it is noticeable that even the sentences themselves lack structure. While in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem it is recognizable that the poem indeed has structure and that it is in fact a sonnet, and even more specifically, a Shakespearean sonnet. That indicates that there are three quatrains and the remaining two lines is the rhyming couplet. In a Shakespearean sonnet an iambic pentameter is also used, meaning that every line has ten syllables. “Love Is Not All” discusses the theme that even though love cannot keep a person alive, a person cannot live without love either. The poem starts off describing what love is not and yet people are willing to give up their lives for it. Through the middle the poet says how she would be tempted to exchange her love to fulfill whatever need she has but the couplet concludes that even though she would be willing to give up her love, she wouldn’t actually go through with it.

“Since Feeling Is First” is about how if a person always worries about order and rules they will not experience love completely compared to a person who does not pay close attention to the structure of things. To experience love fully is to understand and accept