A Sonnet Committed to My Memory

Here's a little paper I wrote for school recently.

A Sonnet Committed to My Memory

There was no single moment when I suddenly realized I wanted to devote much of my life to the study and teaching of English. My desire to study and teach English has come gradually, over several years and many different encounters with literature, both in and out of school. But one encounter with literature sticks out in my mind as being dramatic.

It was a few years back, late at night, in my apartment, and I was browsing through an anthology of American literature. Somewhere near the end of the book, a poem caught my eye: “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I read the poem, then read it again slowly, and then read it again out loud.

It was a beautiful poem. A romantic poem. A life-affirming poem. A poem that evoked my emotions and my intellect.

I thought about the form and the content of the sonnet. Millay certainly had craftiness. Her word selection and her skill in fulfilling the strict requirements of the sonnet form, with its rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter, was to be admired.

But the content of the poem was also striking. That night, as I re-read the poem, each time gaining a little more insight, I tried to get at the meaning of the poem, without limiting it down to a single interpretation. Each line, each image was subject to my critical examination. And the more I probed, the more satisfaction I received from the sonnet. To put it simply, the more I thought about the poem, the more I liked it.

In particular, I thought about the lines, “I might be driven to sell your love for peace,/ or trade the memory of this night for food.” What an interesting scenario Millay has imagined: trading love for food. I tried to think of a time when somebody would have to exchange romance for sustenance. After some thought, I realized that many people have actually made such transactions. For example, people have been compelled to quit the theatre to join the military, and people have abandoned their goals to get the job with the bigger paycheck.

I could go on about how the poem impacted me and how brilliant and meaningful I think “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink” is, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed it so much that I decided to immediately memorize it. I stayed up later than usual, repeating the words of the poem out loud to myself until I could say them all without looking down at the page. And I’m happy to say that, to this day, I can still recite the sonnet from memory.

That moment wasn’t a turning point in my education or in my career plans, but it was one moment among many that have solidified my determination to further my study of English.