Dedicated to....

I suppose this is perhaps Cummings's best-known poem. When I was a schoolboy, I used to think he was 'my secret'. Well, no-one read poetry as a teenager anyway; but even those who did found Cummings too weird, too difficult. I was flattered by the delusion that only I got him. But then Woody Allen had Michael Caine use this poem to woo Barbara Hershey in Hannah and her Sisters, and for a few years suddenly everybody loved Cummings. I need hardly say that I was rather out of gruntle at this state of affairs.

Anyway, I got over my pique at Woody Allen. And the phase of Cummings being universally popular faded a bit. Once more he feels like a hidden pleasure, a poet cherished only by select initiates (yes, there may be several hundreds of millions of us, but we are still 'select', dammit!).

And this poem came to mind this week because I am - for the first time in a long time - giddily in love again. And the young lady who has inspired this feeling does have the most exquisite hands.

somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

[By the way, I've now updated my last 'Poetry Sunday' post on Baudelaire's Albatross, identifying the English translator (thanks, JES), adding the original French text of the poem, and providing a source link with a number of other English versions.]