E.E. Cummings

Since the beginnings of the literature love has been one of the most important themes for the writers and accordingly for the readers. Not only did the poets impose themselves the immensely difficult task to describe the notion of love, but they also left the readers with the enjoyable but not easy thing that is the deciphering the meaning of their descriptions. It is how the American poet, prosaic and dramatist, Edward Estlin Cummings, behaved by giving people the interesting image of love in the poem starting with the words: “love is more thicker than forget…”. In this essay I will endeavour to analyse and interpret his vision of love.

At the beginning I would like to focus on the structure of this poem. It includes four stanzas, each of four lines and of a regular and repeated number of syllables (first stanza:8, 6, 8, 6; second: 7, 6, 7, 6; third: 8, 6, 8, 6; fourth: 7, 6, 7, 6). This, in conjunction with the fact that there are syntactical parallelism, lots of repetitions and cross rhyme (abab) insert the structural regularity to this poem.

With this regularity corresponds the construction, which includes the division of the stanzas. The first and third are divided vertically, with the word “than”: on the left side they have love and adjectives that impose the new meaning for the phenomena on the right side. In addition, the left side is more stable in comparison with the right that is constantly changing. Different division is in the second and fourth stanza – the horizontal division, also with the word “than”. What is interesting here is that the horizontal division occurs in the stanzas, where the sea and the sky are mentioned, which forms another horizontal division between the earth (sea) and the sky – what is a real feature of the nature and the world we live in. In accordance one can say that love is present everywhere, all over the world and people can not hide from it.

What is also important about the construction is that it is based on opposites. One can find at least about ten opposite pairs like: thicker – thinner, seldom – frequent, more – less, mad – sane, forget – recall, fail – win, bigger - littler, etc. From this one may draw the conclusion, that love consists of all those things together, but as they acquired wider meanings by adding adjectives, love is something that can not be recognized by our senses. Because can we see, smell, touch, hear or taste something that is “more seldom than a wave is wet”, or “less always than to win”? Or is it possible to explore “the sea which only is deeper than the sea” or “the sky which only is higher than the sky”? The answer is simple: no. People are only able to imagine those abstract phenomena, to feel and understand them in mind. The same is with love – it can not be smelled, touched, seen, etc. in the literary meaning – it transcends the real world and can only be described in ourselves, using abstract notions. And by having no punctuation marks