XPost: alt.arts.poetry.comments, alt.poetry
On Sun, 1 Jun 2025 4:32:08 +0000, W.Dockery wrote:
George J. Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
love is more thicker than forget. by E.E. Cummings
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
[...]
(read by E.E. Cummings)
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2024/02/love-is-more-thicker-than-forget-ee.html
#pennyspoems
"A poem does not have to mean, but be." -Archibald MacLeish
Cummings can be hard to read, and he likes to play word games, but
there's usually a meaning if you can tease it out (or "decode" it as the modernists say). I won't try to do that for the "verse" stanzas, but the meaning of the "chorus" stanzas is clear to me: LL1-2 of each say that
love is both crazy and moody ("mad and moonly") and stable and happy
("sane and sunly"), sometimes both at the same time; while LL3-4 say
that it's endures as an simple fact of nature, like sea and sky.
If you want a poem to illustrate MacLeish's dictum, a better example
would be one of my pennypoems; they don't mean anything, and don't have
to.
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