The structure of “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” both draws upon, and subverts, that of the Shakespearean sonnet. This poem, however, is not the only one in which Cummings evokes, modifies, and experiments with the sonnet tradition.
An unorthodox sonneteer writing in the modernist spirit of (in the words of Ezra Pound) “mak[ing] it new,” Cummings wrote a plethora of sonnets innovating both the content and form of the fourteen-line poem. Contemporary poetry scholar Ethan Lewis argues that “[i]n re-rendering the sonnet, Cummings characteristically breaks from his contemporaries, focusing on spatial vis-à-vis conventional prosodic […] challenges to convention.” Lewis observes that Cummings pushes the limits of the sonnet when it comes to the exploration of space and scale. The final stanza of the sonnet “a wind has blown the rain away and blown,” for instance, uses large gaps and margins to convey both a spatial and visual disconnection and a semantical break from the previous lines of the poem. “Space being(don't forget to remember) Curved” is another iconoclastic sonnet in that it not only brings in elements of modern science, but also “curves” and distorts the space of the sonnet in a way that interestingly mirrors the content itself.
Twisting the imaginary space of the sonnet is precisely what Cummings does in “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in,” which breaks out of the orderly fourteen-line cosmos of the Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet, and journeys out into the extremities of the universe, and to the edge of literary convention at the time. An interesting exercise would be to read this poem with other sonnets, including “a wind has blown the rain away and blown” and “Space being(don't forget to remember) Curved,” as well as more “conventional” ones including “being to timelessness as it’s to time” and “life is more true than reason will deceive,” and to analyze the different experiments Cummings conducts with a longstanding literary tradition.
