The poem “As Freedom is a Breakfast Food” by E.E Cummings was at first confusing, however, it wasn’t confusing for the same reasons that some of his other poems were. While there are no awkward line breaks or confusing misspellings, what tripped me was the nonsensical nature of the similies and metaphors. Take for example, “as freedom is a breakfastfood.” (1). We can start to try to understand this by thinking of the qualities of breakfast foods: filling and energizing. Perhaps we can say that freedom is energizing, though keeping in mind that it’s perplexing why Cummings would use the word breakfastfood to describe it, but then we get to the following lines which have different similies and metaphors of their own, unconnected to what came before. In trying to figure those out, I completely forget about the breakfastfood simile. Many of these lines seem to just be contradictions or negations of what people usually say, such as “and every finger is a toe” (10) and “and robins never welcome spring” (16). 

The punctuation and syntax also confused me at first. There is no capitalization or punctuation except for some hyphens. Without knowing where the sentences or phrases begin or end, it made it much harder to understand the syntax, such as “molehills are from mountains made.” When skimming, we first read, “mountains made from a molehill” as is the common saying, but when undoing the passive voice, we realize that the line says “molehill made from mountains,” which goes back to the first confusion of the similies not making sense as this is the complete opposite of what people normally say. Besides the syntax, some of the words also are slightly off, like “talentgang,” which makes sense as “a group of talented people” but isn’t a word that we use. 

I started to try to understand these things by going away from analyzing line by line to trying to see the structure of the poem as a whole and the repeating elements. The poem has 4 stanzas of 7 lines each. While there is no comprehensive rhyming scheme, it seems that the last sound of the odd and even syllables in a given stanza rhyme with each other. This makes some of the word choice make since, like using “dong” in line 18 instead of “dawn” to match with spring and long, then changing dinkster to dingster to match with that. In the first three stanzas, the lines start with conjunctions such as “as”, “or,” “and”, or “nor”. The exception to this rule is in every stanza, the line “- long enough and just so long.” This line comes at the 4th line of 1st stanza, 5th of 2nd stanza, and 6th of third stanza, making it seem that it follows a pattern of going one line down per stanza. I made sure to circle these sentences to isolate them as they seem to point to a common theme. 

The fourth stanza doesn’t follow this pattern at all, starting with any type of word. The line that has a hyphen is not the 7th line, deviating from the pattern of the previous stanzas, but is in the middle and says, “time is a tree (this life one leaf) (26)”. However, the 7th line says, “just so long and long enough,” inverting the line of the previous three stanzas. 

I tried to unpack this poem by looking at the last stanza, seeing it as a conclusion separate from the other three stanzas, and by trying to understand the meaning of “long enough and just so long.” I realized that the last three lines made some sense. “time is a tree (this life one leaf) but love is the sky and I am for you just so long and long enough.” (26-28). I interpreted these lines as saying that the speaker’s love is unlimited and the life they have, though limited (a leaf), is enough to enjoy that love (long enough). One extra thing I noticed in these few lines is the word “but” in line 27. To me, it served to distinguish the rest of the poem, which makes no logical sense, from the last two lines, which are genuine. In fact, we can see capitalization in the word “I” in this sentence, further showing a subtle hint to a change to normalcy

Viewing the poem as a love poem and all of the stanzas except the last few as ungenuine brought a different light to the poem because instead of trying to derive meaning from the first three stanzas of the poem, we can instead view them as a reflection of our raw emotions, which often defies reason, carrying over to no logic in those stanzas and order, carrying over to no punctuation in the entire poem, but still manage to have a rhythm to them just like how the poem vaguely rhymes.

I feel that there here are still many unexplored avenues and layers. For example, we can view this through the lens of social commentary during the Great Depression, when the work was written, where though the world had been turned upside down through financial upheaval, people still had each other to rely on. I thought of the New Deal first when coming upon line 8 “as hatracks into peachtrees grow,” where scholars aka hatracks turn into the peach tree of reforms as shown in the political cartoon. However, I didn’t see this as integrating well with the rest of the lines.