how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
These are the closing lines of a poem that many have interpreted as being written in tribute to it title character. The preceding line, for instance, describes him as a handsome man, but the query to the Grim Reaper about his feelings toward the blue-eyed boy has increasingly come to sound to critics more like an ironic question than a sincere one. The jury is still out on whether the poem implies admiration for Buffalo Bill or something less wholesome, but the trend has definitely changed.
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
The final line of this poem, by contrast, has suffered little in the way of reinterpretation. The irony has always been abundantly clear as it follows—separated by a space—a unpunctuated first-person almost stream-of-consciousness rambling of jingoistic, falsely patriotic empty screed which suddenly comes to a harsh, crashing end as the speaker becomes self-aware of his own foolishness.
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
For many a poet, this would be an unusually structured verse, but for Cummings it is really almost downright conservative. Take note of the “eddieandbill” running together to enhance the sense that they are friends or family member perhaps that always seem to be together. When you think of Eddie you automatically think of Bill and vice versa. This playful manner of violating normal conventions of punctuation is one of the hallmarks of Cummings, but in this quote it is much easier to immediately recognize the point behind it and that he is not just being arbitrary for its own sake.
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
For instance, the punctuation in this poem, not just in the title, but in this quote. Notice that the commas are not separated by a space as is expected. The “why” for this break from convention is not as immediately obvious as in the “eddieandbill” example. The poem bulk of the poem is an exercise in paradoxical imagery: eyes that silent, being too near to touch and even the opening line and title purport to speak about somewhere the speaker has never traveled. This juxtaposition of paradox all moves inexorably toward the poem’s just famous closing line about rain having hands. The poem is famously recited in the Woody Allen film Hannah and Her Sisters.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
This quote is from one of Cummings’s most anthologized and famous poems and the opening stanza turns a pretty nifty little trick using reader expectation against itself. The opening line is highly suggestive of the kind of unusual use of language that Cummings is known for, but he even turns that convention on its head. Between the first and the fourth line of the stanza “anyone” has transformed from a pronoun to a proper noun; anyone is the character’s name. And the reader is about to find out that noone loved him like no one else could.
the Bar.tinking luscious jigs dint of ripe silver with warm-
lyish wetflat splurging smells waltz the glush of squirting
taps plus slush of foam knocked off and a faint piddle-
of-drops she says I ploc spittle what the lands thaz me kid
in no sir hopping sawdust you kiddo he’s a palping wreaths
of badly Yep cigars who jim him why gluey grins topple to-
gether eyes pout gestures stickily point made glints squint-
ing who’s a wink bum-nothing and money fuzzily mouths
take big wobbly foot-
Ever watch a movie or TV show where lots of characters are all talking at once in an overlapping sort of way that sounds like a real conversation, and reminds you why most movie dialogue purposely avoids trying to sound like conversation? When done to perfection as in, say, Citizen Kane or any Robert Altman movie, the effect can be extraordinary. When done not so well, the effect is probably close to the experience of reading his stanza. But then Cummings wasn’t trying to replicate the sound of discourse in a busy bar to make it understandable, he was trying to literally create the clamor that is all this sound going on simultaneously. Snatches of clearly intelligible dialogue like “”you kiddo” and “thaz me kid” mingles realistically with the onomatopoeia white noise of bar life like “tinking” and “ploc spittle” to situate a moment in time as an aural portrait conveyed verbally.
