dive for dreams
e.e. cummings
dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at the wedding)
(and dance your death
away at the wedding)
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for good likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)
(for good likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)
- ee cummings
Commentary, by Angela Parlin
Here I am still diving for dreams, while the whole world chases clichés. But I am what I am, and you can’t separate a tree from its roots.
With the heart of a poet, I’m living in a how-to world. The pieces don’t fit, and I doubt they ever will.
People don’t want to see what they don’t want to see. People don’t want to be reminded of things they need before they’re ready to admit they need them. We forget to take multivitamins until our health declines. It wasn’t until an issue surfaced that I started eating these Omega-3 rich eggs every day.
I wonder what it will take for me to trust my own heart instead of looking for confirmation elsewhere.
Will the stars walk backward?
The seas catch fire?
The sun turn dark?
Maybe the mountains will fall into the heart of the sea, and then I’ll get it. Then we’ll all wake up to what matters.
We’re walking around each with a terminal diagnosis, and we have no way to stop this ticking clock.
But what about our neighbors? They shoulder the same burden, and we have something to offer each other. Instead we’re caught up in our hurdles, chasing dreams and running after what everyone else is doing. Instead we’re stuck on so many choices, tangled in the interwebs, disappointed with unmet expectations.
In the words of the poet, “never mind a world with its villains or heroes,” because there’s always chaos, and there’s always beauty.
And Lord-willing tomorrow will be a fresh new day. Full of hope, and possibility.
In the meantime, we can always live by love.
- Angela
in spite of everything
e.e. cummings
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds
-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.
- ee cummings
silently if, out of not knowable
Poem #37 of 73 Poems by e.e. cummings
silently if, out of not knowable
night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess
(only which is this world)more my life does
not leap than with the mystery your smile
sings or if(spiralling as luminous
they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,
less into heaven certainly earth swims
than each my deeper death becomes your kiss
losing through you what seemed myself,i find
selves unimaginably mine;beyond
sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears
yours is the light by which my spirit's born:
yours is the darkness of my soul's return
-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars
and tomorrow and the earth.)
- ee cummings
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| - e.e. cummings, poet |
Commentary
by Bertr & Jerome
I believe I mentioned this quote in my "about me", which you may or may not have read yet. If not, you should definitely give it a read, I think it will help when reading the content in the blog.
This is a quote by e.e. cummings, a rather illustrious American poet whose claim to fame was the rejection of conventional English rules of grammar and mechanics.
In context, the line makes more sense, the intent of his words a bit more clear. I believe that it means to live though the filter of love and to order your steps in the name of love, not selfishness or bitterness and especially not hate. When one orders their steps in the name of love, they will find that their lives, although sometimes and temporarily more difficult, will overall be a better, more accomplished life.
Everyone finds themselves in the face of a hardship and are forced to make the decision of whether or not to act selfishly or out of love. Oftentimes, when acting out of love, the ordeal will become more difficult in the short run. But, if one were to follow the actions of those who consistently act out of love, they would find that these people do, in fact have better lives. If you believe in the celestial, you can call it karma, the idea that what one does is what one brings upon themselves; so, logically if one acts in love, then people will do nothing but to treat them with love. To those who do not believe in karma and like ideals, it is an accepted belief that people are always watching each others actions. The saying goes, "there are always more eyes on you than you have." Therefore, if one consistently acts out of love, people will see that, and take that as an example. More often than not, people treat other people how that person treats those around them. That being said, people will see a person who lives by love and treat them with the love that they have treated others.
This line is saying that regardless of what may happen, even if the impossible were to happen, like the earth changing it's entire rotation, live by love because that is what will make life worth living. If one lives by love, then they will be treated with love, and eventually, die by love.
Live your life how you see fit, and I encourage you to make it one of love. It is never too late to change. Change may be difficult, but for the right reasons, it will always be worth it.
Namaste,
Bertr & Jerome
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Biography - E.E. Cummings
[source: Poets.org]
E. E. Cummings
1894-1962 , Cambridge , MA
Related Schools & Movements:
Concrete Poetry
Modernism
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
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| e.e. cummings, poet |
Biography - E.E. Cummings
Poet
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e e cummings (in the style of some of his poems—see name and capitalization, below), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century English literature.
Poetry
Despite Cummings's familiarity with avant-garde styles (undoubtedly affected by the Calligrammes of Apollinaire, according to a contemporary observation), much of his work is quite traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, albeit often with a modern twist, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings' poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings' work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
From "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in" (1952)
As well as being influenced by notable modernists, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings in his early work drew upon the imagist experiments of Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and surrealism, which he reflected in his work. He began to rely on symbolism and allegory where he once used simile and metaphor. In his later work, he rarely used comparisons that required objects that were not previously mentioned in the poem, choosing to use a symbol instead. Due to this, his later poetry is "frequently more lucid, more moving, and more profound than his earlier." Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.
While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme or meter), many have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his poems.
The seeds of Cummings' unconventional style appear well established even in his earliest work. At age six, he wrote to his father:
Following his autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room, Cummings' first published work was a collection of poems entitled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the public's first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
Some of Cummings' most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style, particularly in unusual and impressionistic word order.
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
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
From "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (1940)
Cummings' work often does not proceed in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences (for example, "they sowed their isn't"). His readings of Stein in the early part of the century probably served as a springboard to this aspect of his artistic development. In some respects, Cummings' work is more stylistically continuous with Stein's than with any other poet or writer.
In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in "in Just" which features words such as "mud-luscious", "puddle-wonderful", and "eddieandbill." This poem is part of a sequence of poems entitled Chansons Innocentes; it has many references comparing the "balloonman" to Pan, the mythical creature that is half-goat and half-man. Literary critic R.P. Blackmur has commented that this usage of language is “frequently unintelligible because he disregards the historical accumulation of meaning in words in favour of merely private and personal associations.”
Many of Cummings' poems are satirical and address social issues but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth.
Cummings also wrote children's books and novels. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat.
