“All in green went my love riding” uses a metaphorical deer hunt to explore the emotional consequences of a love affair. It juxtaposes the speaker’s love—a hunter, clad in green, roaming the outdoors on horseback, and shooting down wild animals—with the speaker—a deer who both observes other animals being chased and is being pursued himself, and is eventually shot down by his beloved hunter. The poem’s abrupt and ironic ending, in which the speaker takes his lover’s arrow and simultaneously reveals his identity as a deer, highlights the tragedy of a violent love affair that overwhelms the speaker's mind and senses.
A main feature of this poem is its musicality—its use of rhythms, repetitions, and phonetic devices. The general structure of the poem mimics that of a song, containing four “verses,” each of which repeats the same syntactical and metrical patterns. The unique rhythms formed by trochees and spondees contribute to the dynamism of this poem, which describes an exciting horseback ride through meadows and valleys. The instances of alliteration, consonance, and assonance throughout the poem also add to the songlike quality of this piece.
The poem is also notable for its references to older literary traditions. It makes allusions to various classical and medieval texts (Diana and Cupid, deities from Roman mythology; color imagery from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and the “cruel woman” trope from courtly love literature and Troubadour poetry) and borrows from the form of the traditional love ballad (its songlike structure, subject matter, use of tetrameters and trimeters, and so on). Cummings, while evoking the past through these allusions and references, also adds his own modern variations to longstanding forms, archetypes, and narratives. Thus, “All in green went my love riding” is a poem that brings the past and present together. Like a fever dream, this takes its readers to a unique mythical realm where time seems unreal, images are tangled with sounds, and love merges with death.
