Julia Schwartz
February 5, 2004
[What If…] by E.E. Cummings
E.E. Cummings’ untitled poem, which begins three stanzas of three with the proposition of “what if,” is an homage to the potential and simplicity of life. Its seemingly mixed up language and tongue twisting lines convey directly the confusion and immediacy of life, which each word having its own importance. As a whole, the poem serves to make us, the readers, think. We wonder “what if” – what if we could adopt the concept of nothing?
Typical of his style, Cummings uses no capitalization in his poem (except the word “Blow,” repeated in the middle of all three stanzas), nor does he invite a title. However, he does indeed utilize various items of punctuation -- no periods; instead he uses commas and dashes, which incite a pause, and the all-powerful question mark which invites us into the poem and its line of thought. The three stanzas of the poem are traditional, with full lines in free verse. There are no words dangling on a line of their own, though the lines break mid-phrase, as do the stanzas.
To a great degree, the looseness of the poem structurally mimics the looseness that Cummings seems to be suggesting through his words, in phrases like “a which of a wind.” The poem is encouraging us to imagine the possibility of a better life: a life where we abandon pain. Yet oddly enough, Cummings does this through a bit of reverse psychology: by asking us to imagine a world where we “blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind / (blow pity to envy and soul to mind),” because then we can learn to despise terror, blindness, and envy and love and cherish hope, seeing, and pity. It is interesting that Cummings groups “mind” with the bad end of things, thus insinuating the need to follow heart and not logic when living the days of one’s life.
Although the poem is a poem of bad on the surface, we forget its foundation on the promise of “what if.” We see lines like “when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,” and we miss the meaning of the “single secret” that is man. We see “strangles valleys by ropes of thing” and the tragedy of “a dawn of a doom of a dream” and “blow soon to never and never to twice.” We miss those final lines of hope: “they shall cry hello to the spring,” a new beginning, as spring is typically representative, and the culminating line, “the most who die, the more we live.” This final line is haunting in its enigma, yet, much like ideas already considered by this writer, it hints at the premise that we need to lose so much of what we have taken into consideration already in our lives to truly find the beauty and salvation of life: we need to abandon “mind” for “soul.”
The polarity that Cummings identifies in his untitled poem is the polarity present in the universe – it is the black and the white, the yin and the yang, the positive and negative on the number line. With his poem, Cummings shows how to bring the two opposing ends together, to create one big circle of life. His words seem jumbled, yet they are not. They are merely representative and symbolic of the way our lives are lived: a life is not coherent; instead, it is a mass of thoughts, ideas, memories, and words strewn together into some sort of perception that is linear by our nature. This is the effect of Cummings’ poem; hence, its effect. The poem is simultaneously confusing and clear, free and formatted. These contradictions are the contradictions of life, and they are the contradictions of self that Cummings probes and poses questions for us to answer in hopes of coming to some variety of terms with the selves we embody in our own lives.