pity this busy monster, manunkind

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In typical E.E. Cummings fashion, this poem was filled with unusual line breaks, punctuation, new vocabulary, and structure. His poem, ‘pity this busy monster, manunkind’, was at first an unscalable wall, lined with nonsensical word choice and the seemingly pointless combination of phrases. To tackle this poem, I started by splitting the poem into sections that seemed somewhat sensible. Looking at the first three lines, the poem already seems pretty daunting. I noticed a couple things: “manunkind” is not a word and that he uses a strong juxtaposition here between “comfortable” and “disease”, two things that seem not to go together. From here, I started to focus on the new word. “Manunkind” refers to “mankind” but with the negation prefix, “un”. I was able to determine that Cummings was making a comment on the unpleasantries of mankind, making a play on words with the “kind” portion of the word. Once I discerned the connotation of mankind he was portraying, I concluded that the “busy monster” he was referencing was meant to be mankind itself. From here, the rest of the lines fit together in a much more sensical way. The first sentence shows that he does not pity mankind, the “busy monster” that it is. Afterwards, he describes progress as a “comfortable disease”, which now under the mankind context makes much more sense. The first three lines ultimately demonstrate Cummings’ disapproval of humanity’s ever-progressing approach on life. 

I had a much easier time understanding the first three lines compared to the rest of the poem. Here, Cummings supposedly describes the “progress” that he mentioned is poisoning humanity. But, my difficulties here were ultimately the phrasing and cryptic wordchoice. For example, “bigness and littleness”, “electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange”, and “unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself”, had me quite confused and intimidated. It felt like I couldn’t understand what even a single word represented. To approach this, I tried to ground myself in what I did know about the poem. First, I knew Cummings was making a comment on humanity’s drive to progress, and the mention of “electrons” tipped me off to think about science as a growing innovation in humanity. From there, I was able to build a few assumptions about his message. I discerned that the “your victim” also pointed towards mankind, claiming that progress was a form of self-induced harm. From there, it was pretty clear that us “playing” with “bigness of his littleness” was a translation to the significance of the insignificant, or the basis of many sciences. The next big clue was “deify”, a word that I could relate to “deity” which led me to understand that “deify” brought on implications of worship and religion. I found this to be an interesting placement because of the surrounding words. The thought of electrons “deifying” one razorblade seemed to be strange given that both electrons and razorblades are symbols of manmade/artificial creation or discovery. Noting all of this down, I decided to continue and hope that these parts would make sense in the context of the remaining phrases. The most telling phrase I came across was “A world of made is not a world of born”. This confirmed my assumption of Cummings’ message in this poem. From here, I was able to see that it was a general negative commentary on the influence human progress has had on nature, the environment, or the “world of born”. It became clear that each of the previous phrases signified science or some kind of modern artificial influence extending harm to nature and inevitably humanity itself. However in Cummings’ case, he describes humanity as “unself” extending “unwish” onto itself. I was again stumped here by his prefix technique. He uses the negation prefix “un” on “self” and “wish” to emphasize the harmful effects that are induced onto the hope or wishes of humanity.

The last few lines of the poem take on an ironic tone that I was not expecting. His almost sarcastic tone switch would have provided me with an extra layer of difficulty, but I was able to understand his intended meaning through the solid evidence gathered at the start of the poem. Here, he emphasizes now that society pities nature, the “poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones”, but that we are never pitied. He describes humanity as all powerful, a specimen of “hypermagical ultraomnipotence”, and that we pity nature and the animals, but not ourselves, the true victims of our environmental harm. In the last lines, Cummings again adopts a confusing technique filled with irregular usages of punctuation. The mix of dashes, semi-colons, and colons, along with the shift to a more casual tone completely threw me off. The only thing that helped me was the last section. He writes, “there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”. I recognized this part as the exact mindset that results in the same environmental harm Cummings criticizes. From there, I was able to work out that he was again making a general comment on the global illness that is human progress. Taking the metaphor of “doctor”, he diagnoses most of humanity with a hopeless case of assuming that there is a second world to live in. 

Overall, Cummings’ “pity this busy monster, manunkind”, was an interesting read and an even more interesting analysis. Most of Cummings’ difficulty here came from irregular phrasing, strange word choice, and unexpected tone shifts. However, my process for analysis ultimately helped me reach a solid and supported conclusion. By building off of the little things I initially understood, referencing his previously used techniques, and clearly sectioning off tone shifts, I was able to understand his disapproval towards human progress.