At first glance, “[anyone lived in a pretty how town]” by E.E. Cummings seems to be a collection of gibberish, with incorrect sentence structure running amok, two total periods, and parentheses thrown throughout. I usually try to add punctuation where it makes sense when I encounter a poem like this, but the jumbled sentences made it almost impossible to do so. The parentheses also seem like obstacles to the flow of ideas in the poem and the utter lack of capitalization, other than two times of the same word, did not seem to allow for any help in creating stopping points where it felt natural to place punctuation. 

However, once I slowed down and reread, I realized that the separations between ideas weren’t actually that difficult to find within the poem. This idea was even furthered when I decided to read the poem aloud and realized there were several natural “stopping points” while I was reading. Also, the parentheses that are seen at some point in almost every stanza, while at first seeming like an obstacle, actually are much easier to fit into the rest of the poem when the parentheses are ignored entirely. They then read as extensions of the ideas that came before them, rather than an interruption of the sentence. 

As I continued reading, I started moving my focus from the poem’s structure to the actual words. I noticed the repetition of either the seasons or of “sun moon stars rain”, except the order of the words was slightly different each time they were mentioned. However, something these two lists both have in common is that they happen at set times throughout the day or year, which led me to the interpretation that these lists were supposed to signify the passage of time. This helped me to figure out the timeline in which the story taking place in the poem was occurring. The concept of the passage of time in this poem is also apparent in stanzas 2 and 9 when Cummings writes about the people who lived in the village reaping and sowing, as the two ideas are switched from stanza 2 to stanza 9, and these actions are done at the beginning and end of seasons. The bells that are mentioned throughout the poem also represent the passage of time, either literally with hours of the day or by signifying weddings, births, and deaths. 

I then started considering the use of the words “anyone”, “noone”, “someone”, and “everyone”. These words confused me at first because I could not figure out the role they played in the story taking place. I first thought that they could just be general words so that anyone could feel a connection to the poem. However, looking back at the title of the poem, I realized that those words seemed to be being used as names. To test this theory, I decided to capitalize each of these words every time they were mentioned in the poem, and I realized the poem was a much easier read. This made me realize that these words were supposed to represent the characters of the story: Anyone, who lived in a pretty how town, and the other residents of the town, Noone, Someone, and Everyone. Using this information, the poem then becomes a love story between Anyone and Noone, who are not paid any attention to by the Someones and Everyones of their town. 

Next, I noticed all the comparisons happening between different words, such as “when by now and tree by leaf”. However, there is a transition that occurs somewhere in the poem in which the comparisons are between the same words, such as “all by all and deep by deep and more by more”. The words that are not technically the same are still related in a way, so my first thought was that they could possibly signify time passing as many other parts of this poem do. As I kept thinking, that first thought expanded into a representation of Anyone and Noone’s relationship. At first, they were similar but not quite the same, such as when Cummings writes “tree by leaf”. Throughout their lives, and thus the poem, they became closer and closer, until they were so close that at the point of their death, they had become one and the same, seen with “all by all”. 

Combining all of the confusing elements of this poem and breaking them apart to figure out their true meaning leads to a beautiful story of two souls, Anyone and Noone, who were able to find each other in a world full of Someones and Everyones who did not understand them. Therefore, despite the difficult nature of this poem, each element adds to the story that is being weaved together through jumbled sentences, obstacle-like parentheses, contradicting comparisons, and an abundance of time-passage metaphors.