"Think not I am Faithful" by Edna St. Vincent Millay (poetry reading)

Edna, who sometimes preferred to be called Vincent, was enamoured with the concept of "free love". Free Love is a misnomer because the term usually means the most costly kind of love: costly because it inflicts the most harm and provides the least valuable returns. The idea of being in love with love where you can find it rather than entering into a mutually committed exclusive relationship is more attractive to the young, who can easily find a new relationship when they've ruined the old one by being selfish and unfaithful. She is right that vows are worthless (unless they relate to a code of morality, such as wedding vows, but even then they are only as strong as that code.) You can't trust a lover's promises because as soon as they get annoyed with you they will deliberately break them. The only person you can trust is one who has high standards of integrity. You can guess what their standards are from how they have behaved in the past. Whatever happened with their last lover will probably happen with you. This sonnet expresses the idea that she won't need other lovers because she had found a lover who is so changeable and fickle thay they supply her need for variety. Of course, like most love poetry, it's not much more than spurious advertising for pretty falsehood. When poets promise undying fidelity or say that, "love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is not shaken", they are more concerned about their lover straying - which motivates them to write a ...