As soon as this assignment was introduced, I knew that I wanted to analyze another E. E. Cummings poem. I had enjoyed reading his poems in class, learning about how he attempts to “shortcircuit” our understanding of language, and I wanted to try and decipher another piece of literature from this ingenious mastermind of words.
My search on the Poetry Foundation website led me to [love is more thicker than forget]. When I first read the title, I was reminded of [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]. However, unlike that iconic love poem, this one is absent of Cummings’ trademark parentheses. In fact, it is completely void of punctuation altogether. This initially threw me for a loop, because Cummings is known for his unorthodox use of punctuation marks to create unique meaning. But I moved on regardless, thinking to myself: “Hey wait….you know what…Cummings is known for weird punctuation…and there’s no punctuation…maybe this’ll be easy!” Then I read the poem. And I had no idea what it meant.
Well, almost no idea, I guess I should say. I knew it had something to do with love. The speaker was clearly making some sort of commentary on the idea of love, but they were doing it through seemingly incomprehensible metaphors and paradoxical statements. The first line, “love is more thicker than forget”, sounds like it was written by a kindergartener. And the second stanza contains the word “unbe”, which I didn’t even know was a real word until I looked it up. I recalled Cummings’ goal of bringing us back to our most basic understanding of how language functions, and then somehow in my mind the phrasing made more sense.
So I went back to the beginning and read it again, line by line this time.
First line: “love is more thicker than forget”. I thought to myself, what is this line saying? I decided that it meant that love is long-lasting, overcoming our ability as humans to forget things quickly. OK, that was manageable.
I moved to the second line: “more thinner than recall”. Wait a minute, that sort of seems to completely contradict the previous line. So love is permanent, but at the same time fleeting?
Third line: “more seldom than a wave is wet”. Well, “seldom” means rare, so love is more rare than wet waves? Waves are always wet, so does this mean love is common? Weird way to phrase it.
Fourth line: “more frequent than to fail”. Love occurs more often than failure. We fail at things all the time. So again, love is common in life. Aha! That’s saying almost the same thing as the previous line! So through one stanza, we have found some meaning, a connection.
After rereading the poem a few times over, I listened to a recording of it read aloud on the Poetry Foundation website, and I noticed a distinct rhyming pattern that was present. The reader stressed the alternating rhymes in each stanza, like “sunly” and “only”, emphasizing the quatrain structure that the poem is written in. When I listened again, I noticed many elements of repetition in the poem. There is alliteration present in the phrases “sane and sunly” and “mad and moonly”. I also discovered through closer examination that the alternating stanzas in the poem are structured literally identically to each other. In the second and fourth stanzas, the beginning of each line is the same:
it is…
and…
than all…
is…
and in the first and third stanzas, there is only one distinct difference. While the last three lines of the first stanza begin with “more…more..more”, the last three of the third stanza go “less…less..less”. More and less are opposites of each other. I went back and searched for any more instances of opposites occurring in the poem, and to my surprise I found many scattered throughout it. “Thicker” and “thinner”, “moonly” and “sunly”, “always” and “never”, “bigger” and “littler”. I was thrown for a loop by these opposites. Why would the poem have so much repetition and sameness but at the same time contain all of these contrasting pairings? I thought back to my initial goal, examining the lines for any meaning that I could get out of them. What is the speaker trying to say through all of these lines? And then everything clicked together.
In this commentary about love, the speaker in this poem is saying both something and nothing at the same time. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker is essentially repeating the exact same thing.
Cummings illustrates in this poem that love, at its core, is not simple. He uses complex metaphors to paint a vivid picture of the nature of love, but that ultimately doesn’t make it any easier for us to comprehend. However, what Cummings is getting at is the idea that even though we may not be able to contextualize, describe, or understand love, we know what it feels like. We can feel it, and we can take comfort in that feeling. We can feel love even in the darkest of times. It is a force that is always present in our lives.
In this poem, Cummings explores the classic theme of love, one that he understands is the most popular and most prevalent in all of literature. There is nothing to say about love that hasn’t already been said before. I think that this is a part of Cummings’ commentary on love that we can see in this poem through his use of repetition in both words and in the format of the stanzas. Cummings plays with both sameness and opposites, making parallels and contrasts at the same time to embellish the complexity of love. He writes this poem using very simple language, but incredibly difficult metaphors, and in doing so creates a nuanced commentary on love that requires thought to decipher.
Hi Jack!
I love that you mention that going into the poem, you expected Cummings to experiment with unconventional punctuation. I think when we come to expect one thing from a writer, and then they do the complete opposite, this can create even more confusion on our end because we don’t have any established patterns to build our understanding off of (since we just learned about it in AP Psych, this established connection is called a neural network).
However, in this case, I think the lack of punctuation works in the poem’s favor. You noted that Cummings crafts many of his metaphors with relatively simple language, and the punctuation reflects this – although the ideas are deeply complex, none of the metaphors are longer than a few words, so the need for pauses or breaths are naturally captured by the line breaks. To me, this simple language seems a very deliberate choice on Cumming’s part. Love is such a fundamental concept that the only ideas that can adequately capture its complexity are such equally fundamental, natural ideas, like the sea (in stanza 3) or the sky (in stanza 4).
Similarly, when I first read your poem aloud, the lack of punctuation created this noticeably vast, open, kind of feeling (this is also apparent in the visual appearance of the piece). As a result, I’m left with the impression that love can’t be contained – it is permanent and enduring, and not even punctuation itself could restrain it.
Hey Jack, similar to you, I also wanted to select a poem by E.E. Cummings for this project as his cat poem that I read in class was pretty easy to understand with a close look, so I thought it would be the same for his other poems. I agree with you that his lack of punctuation in this poem was confusing at first. I had a similar experience with my poem. It had regular punctuation, however, I had no clue what it meant after my first read. Maybe it is an E.E. Cummings thing. I liked how you walked us through your thought process of the first stanza with a line-by-line analysis. I also liked how you meant beyond the general meaning of the poem and looked and the rhymes and the smaller things present in the poem. I agree with your final meaning of the poem and it was great to see your process in getting to the finish line.