Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Cummings

my love
thy hair is one kingdom
    the king whereof is darkness
thy forehead is a flight of flowers

thy head is a quick forest
    filled with sleeping birds
thy breasts are swarms of white bees
    upon the bough of thy body
thy body to me is April
in whose armpits is the approach of spring

thy thighs are white horses yoked to a chariot
    of kings
they are the striking of a good minstrel
between them is always a pleasant song

my love
thy head is a casket
    of the cool jewel of thy mind
the hair of thy head is one warrior
    innocent of defeat
thy hair upon thy shoulders is an army
    with victory and with trumpets

thy legs are the trees of dreaming
whose fruit is the very eatage of forgetfulness

thy lips are satraps in scarlet
    in whose kiss is the combining of kings
thy wrists
are holy
    which are the keepers of the keys of thy blood
thy feet upon thy ankles are flowers in vases
    of silver

in thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes

    thy eyes are the betrayal
of bells comprehended through incense


(this poem by EEC posted in commemoration of the 115th anniversary of his birth)

3 comments:

TS said...

How funny! Just today I was in a bookshop and picked up a volume of e.e. cummings's collected poems. Since it was an impulse purchase I was semi-tempted to take it back.

Btw, saw May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude but it was $12.50 so I passed. Seemed a little pricey.

dylan said...

Is it the 1913-1962 Complete Poems or the 1904-1962 Complete Poems? If the latter, you've done especially well; the poems in the posthumous volume Etcetera are included.

Early Cummings is superb, late Cummings even more so; but there's a period of experimentation that doesn't always succeed. Some of the poems in No Thanks leap to mind. But I think the typographical experiments are overemphasized (both by those who praise them and by those who deplore them); he wrote at least as many sonnets as Shakespeare!

TS said...

Unfortunately it was neither - it's the Collected Poems 1922-1938...