I’m browsing my poetry shelves looking for poets I haven’t read in a while. And there, practically jumping into my hand, is E. E. Cummings’s Poems 1923-1954. I also found him in both my editions of The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950 and 1976).

And right away in the Oxford selections I come to his poem about driving his new car:

She being Brand

-new;and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her…

Yes, that absence of space around the semi-colon is correct, as is the lower case “i”.  Later in the poem:

I was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg.           ing(my

lev-er Right-
oh and her gears being in
A 1 shape passed
from low through
second-in-to-high like
greasedlightning)…

(Any ellipses throughout this post are mine, but all the idiosyncratic punctuation and spacings and capitalizings are Cummings’s. In fact, it’s been hard to keyboard his lines, since my computer keeps “correcting” these “errors.”) Here’s just a bit more of this poem—its final lines—since they continue the wild fun of this ride he’s taking us on:

I slammed on
the

Internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
brakes Bothatonce and

Brought allofher tremB
-ling
to a:dead.

Stand-
;Still)

Periods are rare in Cummings. So the one after “dead” makes (dare I pun here?) its point—by visualizing the deadness, the dead stop, of “dead.”

Other sorts of fun fill the poem “as freedom is a breakfast food”—but I should note, first, that Cummings never titled his poems. Editors use a poem’s first line as its title. Here’s the first of this poem’s four stanzas:

as freedom is a breakfast food
or truth can live with right and wrong
or molehills are from mountains made
—long enough and just so long
will being pay the rent of seem
and genius please the talentgang
and water most encourage flame

We notice first the tetrameter—because so much of Cummings is meter-less. Inside this poem are various delights: the reversal of an idiom in “molehills are from mountains made”; a verb (“seem”) used as a noun in “will being pay the rent of seem”; the puzzling oddness of the opening line’s “freedom is a breakfast food.”

Can we call this oddness “nonsense”? It’s maybe not nonsense as meaninglessness. But it reads to me as non-sense, that is as not quite making sense (because we can’t eat freedom). Even more so in the last line of the following excerpt from the poem “you shall above all things be glad and young”:

you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you’re young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys   may   nothing   more   than   boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time…

Yes, those extra spaces between the words of line 5 are in Cummings’s text. But to my main point: there’s no way I can make sense of that final line. Is Cummings just constructing a line like this (and there are countless more in his oeuvre) for the fun of stretching our minds? To tease us into trying to find a meaning?

Somehow I don’t think these questions apply to the clearly nonsense lines that begin each of the three stanzas of the poem “what if a much of a which of a wind.” The purpose of that first line, I’d say, is the fun of the alliteration. The next stanza starts “what is a keen of a lean wind flays”—where the fun is the rhyming. Then there’s the alliterative play in the final stanza’s first line—“what if a dawn of a doom of a dream.”

One more instance of non-sense that I can’t resist is in “pity this busy monster,manunkind”:

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not.    Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish  through   curving    wherewhen    till unwish
returns on its unself.…

There’s not much of meaning that we can make out here. Yet the poem is somehow engaging. Partly this is due to its invented words: “unwish,” “unself,” and the intriguing “manunkind”—with its play on “mankind,” turning “kind” as “type” or “sort” into “kind” as “nice” (that is, the opposite of “unkind”).

Something else that makes this poem engaging is its underlying pentameter—since regular meters are rare for Cummings. Most often the poems look like “She being Brand”—long and wigglingly skinny.

So I was amazed to come upon a sonnet—yes, a true sonnet form, complete with iambic pentameter and Shakespearean rhyme scheme. Here’s the poem in full:

All ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter’s not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game, what then?

All history’s a winter sport or three:
but were it five,I’d still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.

Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel  dick and dave
—tomorrow is our permanent address

And there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do,
we’ll move away still further:into now

The opening two lines give us something to picture—a winter tobogganing scene—except that what’s tobogganing is “ignorance” and at the bottom of the hill is “know” (one of Cummings’s many verbs used as nouns throughout his poetry).

The second stanza continues the “winter sport” image. But the third: where has the poem taken us now? It’s almost impossible to say. There seems to be a downward then upward motion like stanza one’s—down to “thy grave,” then maybe a move upward in “toil the scale to schrillerness” (another of Cummings’s many invented words). Line 3 is a mystery to me—maybe it exists just for its alliterations.

But line 4, along with the sonnet’s closing couplet, is accessible—in a Cummings sort of way. The poem’s “we” lives at “tomorrow”; yet, mind-bogglingly, “now” is “further” away than “tomorrow.” Note, too, that this final parenthesis is left unclosed. That’s not a typo on my part; it’s how Cummings left it—as if leaving us hanging as we move into “now.”

Well, it’s certainly been fun for me to revisit Cummings after (probably) decades. I’m wondering who else will fall in my hands when I next return to my poetry shelves. For instance, I’m seeing there Hopkins, Blake, Roethke, William Carlos Williams, Derek Walcott…

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.