Edna St. Vincent Millay may have entitled her poem "Love is Not All" but that is not what she means to say. The poem begins with the lines "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink / Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;" (1-2). The intention of the poem is to prove that though love can not supply human basics such as food, water, or air it is still one of the most important things of life. Millay states that even as she speaks there are people who are "making friends with death" (7) because the have no love. She is claiming that although love can not feed a man, he would rather die than live a loveless existence.
     Irony is cleverly used to support the theme of the poem. Considering the beginning of the poem, it is odd to have the speaker admitting that she considers love above all else. That she would give up a chance at peace or food for it. Millay writes "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." (12-14). When first reading the poem one might believe that Millay is bitter towards love, but her poem could possibly be considered an ode to love. So it raises the question would Millay approve of a love that is blinding? A delusional love, that causes one to deceive itself?
     A love such as that found in Adrienne Rich's "Living in Sin". The woman depicted in the poem has formed a romanticized version of a love affair in her mind. She pictures a studio with "no dust upon the furniture of love." (Line 2) as her lover's lair. Adrienne Rich, like Millay, uses irony to shock one to ones senses. She brings to attention that love can blind us from reality. The romantic lover is just an ordinary man, and so too is the studio in which the woman lives. It is  covered in dust and  scattered with plates of moldy food. Yet still the woman is so delusional, as Rich states "By evening she was back in love again" (Line 23).
     Where Millay and Rich teach that love is all important yet blinding Sylvia Plath teaches that love can easily turn to hate. The speaker in the poem sets a tone of resentment and desperation. The speaker is talking about her father and her need of his love when she was young.  In the third stanza we learn that the speaker tried to find her father but was unsuccessful:
This is a metaphor for her need of a stronger connection with her father. The reader also learns that her father was a Nazi soldier, and that the speaker is possibly a Jew. "With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck / And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack / I may be a bit of a Jew" (39-41). These lines help explain how and why the speaker may end up with resentment towards her father.
     However, like the men in Millays poem, the speaker felt she could not live without the love of her father. "I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you" (57-59). The speaker even conveys the delusion that love can bring on when she admits that she "made a model" of her father in the man she married. Yet her description of her husbands similarities to her father prove that she began to resent both men for their connections to Nazism.
     To display such resentment Plath uses a metaphor "The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years if you want to know" (71-74). In the very last line the speaker tells her father "I'm through", showing that the love the poem began with was lost, and had turned into hate.