Friday's Poem with commentary

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-ee cummings

(Since auntiebeck asked)

EE Cummings was one of the most widely read American poets of the first half of the 20th Century. I don't understand much about modern criticism, but I can tell that Cummings' place in the master's pantheon is secure. Modernists worked hard to destroy their readers' concept of a good poem, apparently because they didn't want to look like copycats (modernism way oversimplified). So for Cummings, the way a poem looked on the page or how it sounded when read aloud was as important as the themes within. Better yet, if a poem was impossible to read aloud, Cummings published it. Consider:

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

Not Shakespeare, but included in just about every English language poetry anthology in the last fifty years. In normal order, it reads: l (a leaf falls) oneliness. The concept of loneliness is pictured as a leaf falling. He wasn't the first to use the metaphor, but he was the first to arrange it on the page as lightly and as quickly as the leaf really falls. Cummings loved the shift button for the punctuation, but he almost categorically ignored it for capitalization. His themes run the range from the sacred to the profane and from political missives to nursery rhymes.

I found this poem just after my senior year in high school. I memorized it. For a while, I repeated it every morning before I got out of bed. I'm not sure what was so inspiring for me then, but I think now I identify most with the lines "how could...any... human merely being doubt unimaginable You?" The implication is that we can see God by just being. That an unimaginable thing becomes obvious the moment we stop trying to imagine it. To me it says, "Be grateful for life. Experience each day. Look and listen." These are the days God reveals himself to us--the days I keep trying to describe in this journal. Someday I'll get there.