Poem Analysis #2: e.e. cummings

Hi everybody! Time for round two. Today I'll be doing the poem 9. by E. E. Cummings.

I thought long and hard about what poem to do and eventually decided on 9. because I wanted to do a poem that featured many of cummings' quirks, but was also relatively accessible to casual readers. I really wanted to do i sing of olaf glad and big, but ultimately decided against it since I love it so much and its my favorite poem. I think my appreciation of poems increases when I explain them to other people, so this is a great opportunity for me to get to know a poem I don't know very well!

Again, just a disclaimer: I'm a published poet, but I'm nothing compared to the people I analyze. As such I'm not a professional; I have a day job and go to school, this is just something I do for fun. If you find any mistakes, please point them out and let me know, I'm learning as much as anyone else with these posts. Anyway, lets get started.

9.
by e.e. cummings

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

e.e. cummings is an extremely creative poet. He does things with grammer and with the sounds of words that seem very strange when you first encounter them, but as you understand the context better they reveal themselves to be perfectly appropriate. The most obvious of these quirks in this example is the strange use of punctuation and the non-gramatical insertion of 'kiss' and 'tictoc' that litters the poem.

Unlike the previous poem I did by Emily Dickenson, this poem doesn't use meter and rhythm in a standard way. Instead, the meter is used to drive the energy of the poem, rather than maintain it. Lets take a look at the first stanza.

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

We'll ignore the tictocs for now and focus on the meter. I want you to pay attention to the momentum you have when you read each of these lines out loud. Try seperating the line from its surroundings and reading it as a single piece. At the end of every line you find yourself in the middle, just about to get to the interesting part of the sentence (or in this case, next interesting part). You end up jumping down to the next line in a fit of discomfort, aware of a need to finish this thought that was started. But when you finish that thought, another has begun - and suddenly you've found yourself at the end of the stanza and you don't even realize how you got there.

The effect is to make you feel two things:
1. a slightly uncomfortable, skitzy feeling
2. interested.

If you still don't understand what I mean, here's that same stanza without the line breaks removed. Pay attention to how much easier and boring it is to read:
"There are so many tictoc clocks everywhere telling people what toctic time it is for tictic instance five toc minutes toc past six tic"

The tension we get from unresolved thoughts resolving and unresolving themselves is what makes us interested in this stanza and what draws us into the poem. This refusual to finish your thoughts on every line is a technique I'm personally very fond of and one that I use in many of my own poems. I find that it is a fairly cheap and easy way to create line tension without distracting overmuch from the purpose of your poem.

Now lets talk about those tictocs. You'll notice that the pattern we usually associate with the ticking of a clock goes like this: "tic, toc, tic, toc" with a higher tone of voice or lighter stress on the tics and a heaver, lower tone on the tocs. The tension in this pattern operates like this: the higher intensity 'tocs' take energy from the vacumme provide by the lower intensitity 'tics'. This is kind of difficult to understand, but e.e. cummings uses those implied stresses here in the poem. I'll paste the first stanza here again for convenience:

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

The best example of this is right in the middle of the stanza, when we read, "...for / tictic instance..." The lighter stresses we associate with the 'tic' sound lead us to say 'tictic' at a higher tone, resulting in a simulatanious expression of the absense of energy and an invitation for more, an invitation that descends on the next possible word which in this case is 'instance'. If that seems too complicated, look at it this way: try replacing tictic with tictoc and read how differently this part of the poem sounds. The heavier toc sound will actually weigh you down, and you'll lose the momentum that the tictic sound gives you.

I don't know about you guys, but I find that incredibly fucking awesome. Lets keep going:

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

This stanza exhibits another cool little quirk of EEC, something I like to call a sudden perspective shift. I don't know if thats the correct name for it but I notice this often in EEC's poetry and he always does it in a different way than other poets who are also given to this technique. Basically what he does is insert in the middle of his sentance a different perspective on what hes talking about in a void in the sentance, in an effort to let us see two sides of an image at the same time. For those art fans out there, he's basically exhibiting cubism. I'll highlight it for you:

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

This is the sentance without 'a little jerking'. Notice how the sentance feels much more solid and concrete this way (obviously cummings doesn't use punctuation but we'll talk about that later): "Spring is not regulated and does not get out of order nor do its hands move over numbers slowly"

The 'a little jerking' doesn't seem to be vitally important to the meaning of the sentance at a first glance, and theres a good reason for that impulse: it isn't! Instead, the phrase provides a completely different avenue of intelligence to the sentance that it wouldn't have otherwise. What do we think of when we see somebody's hands shaking? We think that they are nervous, or angry, or emotional in some way. The entire point of this stanza is saying that spring is calm and unregulated; doesn't the idea that it is also unemotional feel perfectly appropriate in the context? From a grammatical or even a logical standpoint this inclusion seems stupid or inefficient, but EEC manages to make it seem perfectly right and logical, to an extent that we don't even notice it when we first read through, as we attribute it to a quirk the poet's voice. We don't see it as a calculated inclusion at all! It feels so... natural.

Cummings does this by including it in the negative space between the verb and the noun, but we won't go into that right now because then we're talking about grammer and predicates and I don't want to write about that lol. What is important for our purposes is that we notice when EEC does this. Lets keep moving:

we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

The narrator is still talking about spring here, remember. You'll notice another sudden perspective shift on the phrase 'springs wheels' there, but since this particular example doesn't really seem to build as much tension as the previous I won't go into it. Instead, lets talk about the colloquial language at the end of the stanza.

Casual commonplace language is, as poets such as Shakespeare knew, devastatingly effective at getting people to like the narrator. There's a reason I use words like 'awesome' and 'fuck' and 'badass' and 'bro' in casual conversation; its for the same reason you see people like Sarah Palin using phrases like 'Momma Grizzly.' Saying profound things in commonplace, stale english breathes new life into the language and makes it more interesting, which makes the people that actually speak that language interested in what you are talking about. It's a technique to get people who wouldn't usually listen to you spend and minute to listen to what they hear. Now, I'm not saying that I say something profound every time I say 'bro' (and I certainly wouldn't say that about Sarah Palin) but you guys know what I mean.

There are a few interesting things happening elsewhere here in the stanza that are worth talking about, but I think this is starting to drag on a bit, so I'll keep moving onto the most exciting part of this poem: The ending!

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to
kiss me)

Parenthesis are a very good, although very delicate, tool. They can't be overused. The reason for this is that they create an incredible amount of tension. I'm reminded of this xkcd comic (its basically a poem in its own right):

[image loading]

Now, EEC matches them, but you'll notice that the left parenthesis tells you "hey! there will be another one of me in a little bit!" and while you read the stanza some part of you is constantly expecting that second parenthesis to show up. That expectation is a cheap and easy way to build tension.

Now, the 'kisses' here are used to separate the language of the poem and make it feel spacier. They are also used to create an alternate reality for this stanza to live in, one where the words are interrupted by the kisses the narrator and his beloved are giving to each other. There's also that adorable final line 'kiss me' in which we've understood the pattern of kisses and are not surprised to find that phrase there, but some part of us suspects that e.e. cummings meant that line as a request.

Ok, thats e.e. cummings. I don't know who to do next, if anyone has any suggestions I'll be happy to consider them. I'm thinking maybe Louise Gluck? The poem "The Racer's Widow" is how I learned to write sonnets, so that might be kind of cool for people.

Poem Analysis #2: e.e. cummings

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