My first thought after completing this poem was that Millay had just contradicted herself. I believe that Millay, through this poem, was saying that despite the factual evidence of how love is not needed on the same level as say food or shelter, most people would rather give those things up than be forced to live without it. After going through all the conflicting statements in this poem about whether or not love was needed as a daily element of life, I realized that Millay may have been using a different definition of love than I originally thought. The term love itself can mean many things. It can be used in the context of an intimate, deep relationship between two people, or that of the love shared between friends and family members.
Society tends to define love along the same lines as affection.
If you love someone, you are affectionate towards them. The question at hand is in what sense was Millay using the term love. At first, it would appear that she was using it as something very casual, as that between friends, because it was not needed to survive and could not save a person from pain. However, the end of the poem uses the term more intimately, as Millay describes how she did not think she could give up the love she had of another in order to prevent her own pain. Maybe Millay s whole purpose of this poem was to show the two different kinds of love we use most frequently and how they apply to our lives.