It’s been a long time since I read e.e. cummings, though he was one of my favorite poets in college. Mike’s suggestion that I might want to take a look at his Unitarian roots made me decide to re-read his Collected Poems. I’m enjoying reacquainting myself with his poetry, especially since it gives me a chance to compare poems that I liked while at college and poems that I like now. I decided not to look at poems I’d marked until I’ve actually re-read them.

I did look back and see that I also enjoyed this poem the first time I read it, suggesting that neither cummings nor i have entirely shaken our Romantic heritage:

21

Oh, sweet spontaneous
earth, how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty . how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest



them only with


spring)

Generally when I think of e.e.cummings i tend to forget about the content of his poems and focus on the rather obvious differences between his poetry and that which proceeded him. Poems like this remind me just how traditional much of the comment seemed. Of course, seen in the context of contemporary poetry, his style also seems much more traditional than it did when i read him in the 60’s. In fact, he reminds me more of Metaphysical poems like Doone and Herbert than he does most current poets.

Still, there’s an immediacy to this poem that reminds me more of Taoism than I would ever have imagined. He rejects attempts to turn Nature into Gods, but contrasts the marvel of spring to the “incomparable couch of death” it’s “rhythmic lover.”

There’s a surprising number of e.e. cummings’ poems that strike my fancy, but many are so well known it hardly seems worth the bother to present them here. What’s more, many involve Spring, and I’m beginning to wonder if my longing for Spring weather hasn’t altered my very taste in poetry.

Here’s a poem that I didn’t note the first time through, probably because I was so caught up with studying to become someone or something I wasn’t that it didn’t appeal to me:

                                       89

               let’s live suddenly without thinking

               under honest trees,
                                  a stream
               does.the brain of cleverly-crinkling
               -water pursues the angry dream
               of the shore. By midnight,
                                               a moon
               scratches the skin of the organised hills

               an edged nothing begins to prune

               let’s live like the light that kills
               and let’s as silence,
                                           because Whirl’s after all:
               (after me) love,and after you.
               I occasionally feel vague how
               vague i don’t know tenuous Now-
               spears and The Then-arrows making do
               our mouths something red,something tall

I’m not a stream, and though at times I seem little more than a stream of thoughts, at this point in my life I can see the wisdom in living “suddenly without thinking/ under honest trees.” It’s too easy in this society to get caught up in the brain of “cleverly-crinkling-water,” caught up in the “Whirl” of activity. I don’t even have a job, but when i got home from a week-long vacation I found 125 emails waiting for me in just one of several email accounts, not to mention the thousand-or-so articles waiting to be read in my RSS reader.

In a world where you’re just as apt to be speaking to a person halfway around the world as to the person sitting next to you, Whirl seems ALL. No wonder some of us have trouble deciding whether we’re better friends with someone halfway round the world who you play Scrabulous with daily or the neighbor you haven’t talked to in six months.

There’s certainly nothing particularly new about the ideas expressed in cummings’ “101″ but I still love the way he says them, exhibiting both his endearing sense of humor and the ambiguity typical of his best poems.

You gotta love a poem that begins “Humanity i love you” and ends “Humanity i hate you.” Surely, somewhere between those two extremes must lie the truth, or, at least, something that will pass as the truth:

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

Those of us who’ve spent our lives trying to improve society (I’m pretty sure I wasn’t teaching for the money) seem oblivious to the fact that human nature is remarkably resistant to change. Although this poem was written at the beginning of the 20th Century, it certainly seems as true today as the day it was written.

The media, and, thus, society is fixated on Success and those who’ve attained it, no matter how many people they’ve betrayed on their trip to the top.

Even in a society as depraved as our own, “country,” “home,” and “mother” still seem to have the ability to launch songsters to the top of the pops ladder.

And judging from the popularity of some seriously dumb beer commercials, more than a few young people have pawned their “intelligence to buy a drink.”

It’s almost enough to make you question why you continue to love the human race, isn’t it?

I was a little surprised to discover that I had marked this poem as one of my favorites the first time I read it long ago while in college. I suspect I must have liked it for very different reasons than i do now:

136

oDE

o


the sweet & aged people
who rule this world(and me and

you if we’re not very
careful)

O,


the darling benevolent mindless
He-and She-
shaped waxworks filled
with dead ideas(the oh


quintillions of incredible
dodderingly godly toothless
always-so-much-interested-
in-everybody-else’s-business

bipeds)OH
the bothering
dear unnecessary hairless
o

ld

As a college student I must have seen this as a rebellious statement, now I find myself worrying I’ve become that doddering old fool “filled with dead ideas.” It’s hard not to feel like a dinosaur when you go to your local Blockbuster and can’t find a single movie you really want to sit through. Is that really music they play on most local stations? No wonder the record companies are complaining about losing money.

I must admit that every time I look at some “dodderingly godly toothless/ always-so-much-interested-/ in-everybody-else’s-business” Republican explaining why we must Stay The Course i’m pissed that the Republican party is giving a bad name to us poor old white guys.