Mount Chocorua, watercolor painting by E. E. Cummings
SUNY College at Brockport Foundation
Photograph courtesy of the E. E. Cummings Trust
___________
SWEET SPONTANEOUS EARTH
THE RETURN OF SPRING for the Cummings family was always greeted with the joy that is common to New Englanders after the rigors of winter. Even as a small child, Estlin recorded the flowering of the first crocus in his journal. In his later years, springtime in New York met with his welcome, as the ailanthus tree (“tree of heaven”) came into leaf outside his third-floor studio window at 4 Patchin Place. In 1920, the year of his first appearance in a major literary magazine, the Dial, he printed five poems devoted to spring, including “spring omnipotent goddess” (his father did not approve of those slobbering thighs) and “O sweet spontaneous earth.”
Cummings was indebted to his boyhood summers at Joy Farm for his Wordsworthian love of nature. The stacks of juvenile verse that continued to pile up during his years at the Cambridge Latin School are interlaced with poems on songbirds, hawks, chipmunks, butterflies, sunsets, moonrises, and misty dawns.
In his adult life, after the death of his father in 1926, Cummings continued to live at Joy Farm from May to October every year, and the place became an increasingly satisfying retreat in the years after World War II, for New York had changed from a very livable city to an overpopulated, traffic-snarled center of urban hustle. He took up birdwatching and thumbed well Roger Tory Peterson’s guidebooks. He painted Mount Chocorua as often as Cézanne did Mont Sainte-Victoire. Watching the sun set behind the mountain became an evening ritual that he required everyone in the house to join.
The poems in this section show many moods as well as individual responses to spring, birds, mountains, sunrise, and sunset. But most of them come from the early period when Cummings sought imagery that brought surprise, such as in “beyond the stolid iron pond,” in which he presented sunrise in terms of judging a harvest competition and then of a gambler on a roll, or in “the sky a silver,” in which the rain is likened to a Debussy piano piece and the mist to a game of blindman’s buff. Or they display his Cubist diction, as in “beyond the brittle towns asleep” with its “chattering sunset” and its “stealing needles of foam” “threading” the shore.
In all periods of his writing Cummings shows his delight in the rhythms of the seasons. No experience of the natural scene could bring him more lift of heart than looking out his window to watch fluttering snowflakes, as he depicts them in “SNO,” sounding like tiny angels stropping themselves against flower petals. But when winter had ruled for months, he was ready to push back the cold and say hello to spring.
spring omnipotent goddess thou dost
inveigle into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous angleworm
thou dost persuade to serenade his
lady the musical tom-cat,thou stuffest
the parks with overgrown pimply
cavaliers and gumchewing giggly
girls and not content
Spring,with this
thou hangest canary-birds in parlor windows
spring slattern of seasons you
have dirty legs and a muddy
petticoat,drowsy is your
mouth your eyes are sticky
with dreams and you have
a sloppy body
from being brought to bed of crocuses
When you sing in your whiskey-voice
the grass
rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge
spring,
of the jostle of
thy breasts and the slobber
of your thighs
i am so very
glad that the soul inside me Hollers
for thou comest and your hands
are the snow
and thy fingers are the rain,
the screech of dissonant
flowers,and most of all
i hear your stepping
freakish feet
feet incorrigible
ragging the world,
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
in
Spring comes(no-
one
asks his name)
a mender
of things
with eager
fingers(with
patient
eyes)re
-new-
ing remaking what
other
-wise we should
thrown a-
way(and whose
brook
-bright flower-
soft bird
-quick voice loves
children
and sunlight and
mountains)in april(but
if he should
Smile)comes
nobody’ll know
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
the sky a silver
dissonance by the correct
fingers of April
resolved
into a
clutter of trite jewels
now like a moth with stumbling
wings flutters and flops along the
grass collides with trees and
houses and finally,
butts into the river
now winging selves sing sweetly,while ghosts(there
and here)of snow cringe;dazed an earth shakes sleep
out of her brightening mind:now everywhere
space tastes of the amazement which is hope
gone are those hugest hours of dark and cold
when blood and flesh to inexistence bow
(all that was doubtful’s certain,timid’s bold;
old’s youthful and reluctant’s eager now)
anywhere upward somethings yearn and stir
piercing a tangled wrack of wishless known:
nothing is like this keen(who breathes us)air
immortal with the fragrance of begin
winter is over—now(for me and you,
darling!)life’s star prances the blinding blue
Other Seasons, Other Creatures
SNO
a white idea(Listen
drenches:earth’s ugly)mind.
,Rinsing with exact death
the annual brain
clotted with loosely voices
look
look. Skilfully
.fingered by(a parenthesis
the)pond on whoseswooning edge
black trees think
(hear little knives of flower
stropping sof a. Thick silence)
blacktreesthink
tiny,angels sharpen:themselves
(on
air)
don’t speak
A white idea,
drenching. earth’s brain detaches
clottingsand from a a nnual(ugliness
from!the:A wending putrescence. a.of,loosely
;voices
beyond the stolid iron pond
soldered with complete silence
the huge timorous hills
squat like permanent vegetables
the judging sun pinches smiling
here and there some huddling vastness
claps the fattest finally
and tags it with his supreme blue
whereat the just adjacent valley
rolls proudly his belligerent bosom
deepens his greens inflates his ochres
and in the pool doubles his winnings
the hills
like poets put on
purple thought against
the
day
tortured
in gold,which presently
crumpled
collapses
exhaling a red soul into the dark
so
duneyed master
enter
the sweet gates
of my heart and
take
the
rose,
which perfect
is
With killing hands
beyond the brittle towns asleep
i look where stealing needles of foam
in the last light
thread the creeping shores
as out of dumb strong hands infinite
in the last light
pours its eyeless miles
the chattering sunset ludicrously
dies,i hear only tidewings
in the last light
twitching at the world
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s Sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
now comes the good rain farmers pray for(and
no sharp shrill shower bouncing up off
burned earth but a blind blissfully seething
gift wandering deeply through godthanking ground)
bluest whos of this snowy head we call
old frank go bluer still as(shifting his life
from which to which)he reaches the barn’s immense
doorway and halts propped on a pitchfork(breathing)
lovers like rej and lena smile(while looming
darkly a kindness of fragrance opens around
them)and whisper their joy under entirely the coming
quitenotimaginable silenceofsound
(here is that rain awaited by leaves with all
their trees and by forests with all their mountains)
a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long
(and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start
the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration.........a wind has blown the rain
away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
the trees stand. The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.
mouse)Won
derfully is
anyone else entirely who doesn’t
move(Moved more suddenly than)whose
tiniest smile?may Be
bigger than the fear of all
hearts never which have
(Per
haps)loved(or than
everyone that will Ever love)we
’ve
hidden him in A leaf
and,
Opening
beautiful earth
put(only)a Leaf among dark
ness.sunlight’s
thenlike?now
Disappears
some
madeof imagination
;the incredible soft)ness
(his ears(eyes
when god lets my body be
From each brave eye shall sprout a tree
fruit that dangles therefrom
the purpled world will dance upon
Between my lips which did sing
a rose shall beget the spring
that maidens whom passion wastes
will lay between their little breasts
My strong fingers beneath the snow
Into strenuous birds shall go
my love walking in the grass
their wings will touch with her face
and all the while shall my heart be
With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea