I’ve never been well-versed in poetry. I read Rabbie Burns (that’s Robert if you’re not up on your Scots), who is known mostly for the lyrics of Auld Lang Syne. He also wrote a rather charming poem called “Ode to a Haggis” that I find cheerful and enticing. I love reading his poetry. The rhythm and flow of his language is in my blood.

I’ve enjoyed Robert Frost on occasion, and Shakespeare’s sonnets (who, after reading Sense and Sensibility doesn’t love Sonnet 116?) — I’ve had fleeting love affairs with William Cowper and Emily Dickinson and a few others. The poet I hold dearest to my heart, gentle viewers, outstrips all of the above in my estimation.

e.e. cummings.

The first poem of his I ever read was anyone lived in a pretty how town. his use of language felt so deliciously magical that I couldn’t help but read it again. And again.

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep

Reading e.e. cummings made me feel a mystery and a sensuality of language I had never encountered before. As someone who has always quite liked rules and logic, it seems a bit disingenuous that I would gravitate so intensely to someone who broke and remolded conventions of written language so much that it’s incorrect to write his name with any capital letters. i still read his poems over and over again and marvel at his melodious flowing stanzas, the rhythm and pulse of his words. Reading cummings feels like watching stars be born.

And so, gentle viewers, I would like to share one of my all-time favorite poems with you. It’s one of his more well-known poems (at least the last stanza), but it still makes my skin hum when I read it. I hope you enjoy it.

What does this have to do with my “Sunday My Prints Will Come” theme? Inspiration, pure and simple. He defied so many traditions and conventions, and e.e. cummings still touches lives today.

Here it is…

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond

e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Related articles

• What makes a poem? (poetic-muselings.net)
• WordPress&ThisPoet=War (poetrypoemspoets.wordpress.com)
• Eve Redwater (everedwater.wordpress.com) An excellent writer and poet — do pay her a visit.
• auld lang syne (oddlittlerants.wordpress.com)