as long as your army keeps perfectly still
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
cummings' poem consists of two large elements: the word "loneliness" and the parenthetical interjection, "a leaf falls." a parenthesis normally adds to a sentence an explanatory comment which the writer wants held in mind at the time that he completes his main idea. so, here, cummings asks that we hold in mind simultaneously the idea of loneliness and the image of a leaf falling. he might have said, "loneliness is like a falling leaf." more specifically, he might have said, "the feeling of loneliness is the feeling a person gets when they watch a single leaf falling." it does not take much imagination to fill in around this assertion and think of autumn, the end of the growing season, the death of the year.
but cummings' poem does not make an assertion about loneliness. such an assertion would not have been very interesting. we would have nodded or shaken our head, according to our inclination, and gone about more important business. instead, the poem combines the abstract idea and the concrete image in such a way as to show us something and, in showing us, to elicit our participation in a meaningful experience. it asks us, in effect, not to cogitate about the relationship between loneliness and dead leave and, if we wish, to make our own poem; it asks us to look at the printed page.
what extra dividends does cummings declare by his apparently whimsical splitting of the word "loneliness"? omitting the parenthesis, the poem looks like this:
l
one
l
iness
thanks to the modern typewriter whose letter "el" (l) doubles as the number (1), cummings shows us that a very common-place word is really a quite singular word. it states its meaning five times. it says, "loneliness," but it also says, "one-one-one-iness" (that is, the quality or condition of being "1"). cummings has revealed something quite extraordinary in a word we had always thought very ordinary. this is a discovery. it is difficult to say how valuable a discovery it is, but it is one of a special kind.
the arrangement of the parenthetical material in the poem likewise yields special cosmetic values. its verticality is a linguistic picture of the falling leaf. even the letters have visual import. the pattern of large and small letters in "le/af/fa/ll" suggests the graceful, delicate twisting of the leaf as it circuitously falls. the single letters at the beginning and the end of the process ("a....s") enclose four two-letter lines, and, in so doing, reveal an overall symmetry in the leaf's falling and, at the same time, echo the symmetrical stanza arrangement of the poem as a whole.
in addition to visual effects the poem gains significant sound values from breaking up and rearranging the words. the visual twisting of the leaf benefits from being bound together by sound. a long "e" binds the movement from "le" to "af." the "f" does the same for the next two lines. more important, however, are the thrust and resolution produced by cummings handling of the only repeated sounds: "l," "e," and "s." the "l" in "leaf" echoes the first "l" in loneliness" and aids the process of holding in mind simultaneously the material within and without the parenthesis. it is emphasized by the double "l" in "falls" just before the parenthesis ends, when the reader returns to the development of "loneliness." in like fashion, the final "s" in "falls," at the very end of the parenthesis, points toward the double "s" at the very end of the poem.
the last line "iness" resolves the poem in several ways. it not only rounds out the "s" in "falls" but, in doing so, repeats another sound from the parenthetical phrase, the "e" in "leaf." with its two syllables it is also a long line, befitting a conclusion. its "rhyme," its length, together with the whispering quality of the fallen leaf. the line, in short, provides a synthesizing final chord for both the sounds and the action of the poem, just as it completes the tortuous route of the word "loneliness" itself.
this analysis of the development of cummings' poem implies surprising conclusions. the poem is quite different from the sentimental self-pity in which we might have indulged ourselves if we had simply sat back and contemplated the identity of a falling leaf and loneliness and the evanescence and meaninglessness of life. man is indeed as fragile as a leaf. most of the time he is alone, and his solitude causes him pain, particularly in a society which values a superficial togetherness. and when life is through with him, it simply blows him away or, if he is lucky, permits him to wither and drop.
as we have seen, cummings' leaf does not merely plummet meaninglessly to earth. it also slips and twists with the grace and delicacy and symmetry of circus acrobats. in his play Him, written in 1927, cummings' artist-hero refers specifically to the circus in a climatic moment of self-discovery. acrobats, because they perform in the face of death, are completely and exhilaratingly and uniquely aware of themselves. "the average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions," he says. "but imagine a human being who balances three chairs, one on top of another, on a wire, eighty feet in air with no net underneath, and then climbs into the top chair, sits down, and begins to swing..."
the leaf falling is like the acrobat, and it is also like the bullfighters that cummings' contemporary, ernest hemingway, wrote about. according to hemingway, the test of a bullfighter was his ability to perform graceful movements close to the bull's horns. good bullfighters provided living symbols of man's ability to live with dignity, despite the ever present threat of dissolution. indeed, by implication, the sharper his awareness of death, the greater his dignity. the particular quality of experience that cummings invites us to share is also very like the one which the bible cites in enjoining us, "he who would find himself, must lose himself." athletes know an approximation of this ideal in the moment when, after long hours of practice, they suddenly find that they do not have to think bout what they are doing. they don't have to struggle to avoid particular errors; they can just relax and let their muscles take over. they reach their highest perfection in a unique kind of awareness that is self-forgetting.
ultimately, this self-forgetting is what cummings' treatment of "loneliness" adds up to as well. we have seen how "iness" resolves the sounds, the action, and the word "loneliness" itself. but the line resolves a dimension of meaning as well. dividing the word "loneliness" has produced and insistent emphasis on the idea of oneness. it is as though cummings had shown us that the inner meaning of man's unhappy isolation is his very preoccupation with himself. significantly, then, at the end, he also gives us an image of the ultimate nature of human beings: lower-case "i-ness." the poem which ends in a sense of serenity, of unhappiness and death somehow resolved, explains itself ultimately in terms of that special self-forgetting which is utter humility. the movement of the poem has not been swift and rollicking, full of confidence in the possibility of human transcendence. it has, instead, been slow, difficult, even severe, suggesting that hard-won, disciplined achievement of a tragic self-knowledge.
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it rained a whole lot today. it was really nice and refreshing, considering it hasn't done so in months, which is really strange for a place like this. kitty seemed to appreciate it too. i used to hate the fact that it rains so much here, but after feeling so down lately and going through day after day of unbearable humidity and heat, it was really comforting. winter couldn't come any sooner. i really miss how quiet and neutral it makes things.