Love
“All in green went my love riding” is a poem about a violent love affair. The speaker compares himself to a deer chased by a hunter goddess who captures and ruthlessly kills him. The physical death of the deer stands for the emotional death of the speaker when he is rejected by his beloved or simply overwhelmed by the experience of falling in love.
Death
The poem explores death in both its literal and figurative forms. In the literal sense, the poem describes the physical death of a deer. Figuratively, this death is a metaphor for the agony of unreciprocated love.
The poem also explores “dreams” and “sleep,” as replicas of death. Death and sleep collectively refer to the general state of emotional and mental paralysis one may experience in a romantic failure. The images of sleep and paralysis form a sharp contrast with the dynamism of the hunter: while the speaker lies in sorrow, the speaker’s love goes horseback riding, roams the wilderness, and hunts.
The form of this poem also imitates the abrupt and unpredictable nature of death. Cummings ends this piece at a very unexpected moment, leaving some components of the poem’s repeated structure missing. The finale of “All in green…” is as sudden as death itself.
Violence
The theme of death goes hand in hand with that of violence. The literal and figurative deaths in “All in green went my love riding” are caused by the shooting, hunting, and emotional violence enacted by the hunter/beloved. Cummings equates the politics of romance with those of hunting: The relationship between the subject and object of love is described in terms of the dynamic between a hunted animal and a hunter, in which the former bears the power to captivate and destroy the latter. The speaker’s love thus has the upper hand in this relationship, because she owns the arrows, the horse, the hounds, and possesses great power over the speaker’s emotions.
Nature
The poem is set in a naturalistic yet mythical landscape that allows for the exploration of the unknown and magical. We see geographical features —“white water,” “meadows,” “a golden valley,” “mountain,” and “peaks”—accompanied by animals—the “horse,” “hounds,” “roebuck,” “deer,” and “does”—and a hunter goddess, clad in green, roaming in her realm.
The sense of fascination the speaker bears toward the world of nature imitates romantic wonder: just as he is enthralled by the deer and the meadows, the speaker is captivated by the charm of his beloved. Yet at the same time, the laws of nature are merciless. The carnivorous hounds track down the deer, the weak die at the hands of the powerful, and the speaker’s beloved ruthlessly rejects the speaker’s feelings for her. Through the naturalistic setting, Cummings explores both the wonders of love and the food chain of romantic relationships.
Mythology and Classicism
“All in green went my love riding” is rife with allusions and references to older textual traditions. Cummings borrows from the images associated with the Roman deity Diana—goddess of the hunt—to describe the speaker’s hunting, horseback-riding beloved. It refers to the myth of Diana and Actaeon, in which the latter, a young male hunter who sees Diana and her nymphs naked, transforms into a deer, and is eventually shot to death by the hunter goddess. Cummings also alludes to Cupid—god of desire and erotic love—in the mention of arrows in the context of a love poem. The setting of the poem also evokes the mythological woods in which Diana and her followers would hunt.
The speaker’s beloved is also an allusion to the “cruel woman” motif of courtly love literature. Troubadour poems such as Guido Cavalcanti's "Voi, Che per Gli Occhi Miei Passaste al Core" feature the archetype of a cruel mistress who rejects male love. The figure in “All in green…” who ruthlessly destroys the speaker and his affection is an allusion to this literary archetype.
In addition to making these allusions, Cummings hearkens to older literary traditions in the English language. The poem, in discussing romance and frequently utilizing tetrameters and trimeters, borrows from the themes and metric patterns of the love ballad. Yet Cummings adds his own twists to the classicism of this poem, by using, for instance, trochees and spondees in the place of iambs, and merging the narrative with images of hunting, violence, and death.
Gender
The dynamic between the speaker and his love makes an interesting claim about gender. In alluding to a powerful mythological goddess, and positioning her as the destroyer of the speaker’s love and life, Cummings explores the notion of female violence. In this poem, a woman’s rejection of a man’s affection toward her is equated with the act of shooting down a wild animal. Perhaps Cummings is trying to identify a power imbalance between certain genders in romantic relationships.
What complicates this reading of gender dynamics, however, is the ambiguity of both the gender of the speaker and that of the hunter. Lacking any gendered pronouns, the poem does not make a direct reference to the femininity or masculinity of its characters. Some scholars, on the grounds of the poet’s gender (male) and the allusion to Diana, identify the speaker as a man and the hunter as a woman, while other scholars argue that the hunter, in fact, cannot be a female, because of the unconventionality of the notion of a woman riding a horse and hunting wild animals. Cummings, however, does not give a clear answer to this question of gender.
Time
Time is fluid in “All in green went my love riding”—the past and present seem to merge together. The use of the past tense indicates that the incidents in the poem have already taken place, yet the tone of this poem communicates a sense of urgency. The repetition of the word “before” conveys multiple meanings, such as "at a previous time (to)," “in front (of),” or “in the face (of).” The speaker is killed in the last stanza, yet somehow survives to narrate this poem. Classical forms and myths merge with Cummings’s experimentalism and state-of-the-art poetics. Thus, this poem is about the ways in which literature and language can bring the past into the present, and link elements of the present with the past.
