“i carry your heart with me…” – a poem of love

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

- E. E. Cummings

Our Comments...

This poem is very different from many others we have read. The first thing we noticed about it is that the poet, E.E. Cummings, does not use periods, spaces between punctuation and parentheses, or capital letters. Although he does not use periods, he uses parentheses and semi colons for a pausing effect. We are not sure why E.E. Cummings chose to write this poem in this way, but we think it may be so that the intensity of what he is saying is not broken. After reading this poem, we wondered if he wrote other poetry in the same fashion, and we found that he did. We wondered if he liked the aesthetics of all the letters being equal in size, or if he did not use periods because he wrote with an organized stream of consciousness. After a little research, we found that he wrote some poetry in a way to show simplicity and glee. After reading this poem, that explanation makes sense. It is incredibly interesting how E.E. Cummings wrote something, and then explained or added to it within the parentheses. For example, he writes, “i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)”. This really shows the warmth and affection that this poem contains.

I like my body when it is with your …

 The poet is speaking to his lover yet again, this time telling her how he loves it when his body is with hers. He thinks it is an exciting new experience.  He wants to interpret this poem like; the muscles feel better and the nerves are more alive. He likes his lover's body, the things that it does, how it reacts and moves. He likes to feel her spine, its bones, and "your" body and skin's firm- and smoothness (which he wants to kiss again and again and again). He likes kissing every inch of her body and as he so eloquently puts it, he likes to "slowly stroke the shocking fuzz of her electric fur" (we believe that this means her skin and hair; perhaps the fuzzy body hair on your arms, face, and other various regions of the body--as he alludes to when he refers to "and what-is-it comes over parting flesh". Finally, he ends with the enjoyment he feels when looking into his lover's eyes, those "big love-crumbs" (we just love that terminology--it "cracks me up", and I have also noticed that Cummings is quite fond of using the word "crumb" in his poems), and perhaps, he enjoys and gets a thrill out of that "new" feeling he receives when having (you) "under me you so quite new"-a wonderful means of switching the structure or syntax around to make it sound more confusing than it really is.