monday poem(s) #67: e.e. cummings, two sonnets
I first read e.e. cummings (and Yeats, and Nikki Giovanni) in Cricket when I was a kid. Amazing magazine, that.
Reading cummings had a terrible effect on my middle- and highschool poetry, of course, because I copied the formal features without having the slightest notion of what those features were doing. I've had his 100 Selected Poems sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now; I had it because I wanted to read a wider sampling of his work than the very small slice I knew. But then I didn't get around to actually reading it until last week.
Both of these are sonnets - I hadn't realized cummings wrote so many of them! - and both are poems I didn't know at all prior to working my way through this book. I love their optimism and exuberance. I'm very happy to have found them.
you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you're young,whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love
whose any mastery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time
that you should ever think,may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?
all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.
Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
-tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still futher:into now
Reading cummings had a terrible effect on my middle- and highschool poetry, of course, because I copied the formal features without having the slightest notion of what those features were doing. I've had his 100 Selected Poems sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now; I had it because I wanted to read a wider sampling of his work than the very small slice I knew. But then I didn't get around to actually reading it until last week.
Both of these are sonnets - I hadn't realized cummings wrote so many of them! - and both are poems I didn't know at all prior to working my way through this book. I love their optimism and exuberance. I'm very happy to have found them.
you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you're young,whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love
whose any mastery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time
that you should ever think,may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?
all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.
Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
-tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still futher:into now