Monday, 25 May 2015

Power of Love- I carry your heart with me (I carry it on)

(I carry your heart with me (I carry it on))- EE Cummings


Probably biased with this one, because this is one of my favourite love poems of all time, luckily our English exam is about love, and it gave me a good excuse to analyse this poem in depth- it's only three stanzas, read it here

Summary

The poem opens with the speaker declaring, " I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)." Its a poem about the sense of unity he has with the person that he loves, whereby everything he does and feels is connected to her. It is, essentially the unconditional love expressed from a man to a woman and it is about how love shapes the people that we become. Read it, and you will notice a whole bunch of punctuation, metaphors, and motif, which really emphasises the way he feels about the one he loves. 

Breakdown

Stanza 1-  There are already major topics you can write about here, for example how Cummings uses a modern spin on the poem, using the  zany lowercase, syntactical, punctuation experiments. He uses figurative language because he cannot literally 'carry' her heart... because she'd be dead. Instead, he means he can feel her presence and love around her at all times, he carries it in him. He uses a lot of parenthetical clauses (duh), and we can gather that the parenthesis are within the adjacent word, like they are connected. It shows the unity with his lover as he is quite literally, next to it- so visually and contextually, we are under the impression that the two are connected.
Remember, parenthesis are supposed to add something to the text already provided without interrupting the flow of thought entirely, but here, they serve the purpose of visually connecting the speaker and the lover.
There is also parallelism in the third line, with " i go" and "you go". 
By the time the 5th line rolls around, we notice the enjambment between the lines, this is to help clarify what the lover is feeling, we thus recognise "fear" as an individual feeling, literally alone on the page for the reader to see.
Cummings also uses personification with the idea of the "sun singing". Obviously, the sun doesn't really sing, but if it did- it would sing about the speaker's lover. That is how awesome and cosmic their love is. All together now: aww.
Overall, these first few lines ( I know, we're not even halfway through yet), are all about her being with him in spirit and how a part of her will always remain inside him. The fear, pain and potential loss of losing someone you adore is unimaginable and deserves its own line to emphasis his apprehension.

Stanza 2-  The third stanza starts with anaphora of "here is the" which make the poem sound very lyrical and romantic. There is ambiguity when he talks of "deepest secret nobody knows" which leads us to question its mystery... maybe that was what he was getting at, how love is the greatest mystery of all. There is reference to their love as symbolic foundations of life. How you cannot have trees without roots or pretty flowers without buds. It is an extended metaphor, as he uses roots and buds to represent his love as foundations.
Obviously, this is all nature imagery and metaphors which keeps the whole flow of the poem very relaxed and natural (make your own conclusions up about why he uses nature). He also uses repetitionof the "of the" clause- Cummings is using syntax to not only keep things sounding lyrical but also to be as efficient and precise with his language as possible.
Overall, he makes references to real life ideas like the sky and the trees and once again to the stars. These lines are used to make the reader anticipate the release of his secret and draw them into his 'grand finale'.

Stanza 3- The speaker ends by (almost) perfectly referencing the title, in true Romantic poetry style, with the omission of "with me". After all the nature blah blah, we're back to where we started, with the speaker carrying the idea that love is within him at all times. We're also reminded of the unity he feels with his lover, with the parenthesis. This stanza only has one line. So Cummings is making it clear that line 15 is the entire point of the poem. It gets its own stanza because its so important and special.

Overall

There really isn't much else you can tackle with this poem, unless you want to go into whether it is free verse with occasional trochees, but that's pretty self explanatory, but if you don't understand those- Get Revising has some pretty good pointers on poetic diction, which is worth checking out. If you still feel like it isn't enough, some girl made a pretty cool essay on it (pft, what a saddo, who blogs about English revision.. am I right? Am I right? No... okay), which is worth a read. 

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