Poetry for Students

Volume 19 275

love is building a building,” and which was one of

the examples that aroused Bode’s displeasure. It

expresses at once strength and weakness, and yet

it is not devoid of meaning. The transcendental con-

text is clear: this “intense fragility” of the beloved

is like nothing that can be encountered in the every-

day world of experience. It is fragile because it is

likely to break up at any moment, in the sense that

it is constantly leading the lover on to something

beyond his customary self. This is the experience

of completely open awareness that is at the heart

of the poem, and which is clearly evoked, again

through paradox, in the fourth line of this stanza.

In that paradox, “death and forever,” the

speaker dies to all smallness, all limitations, all

petty concerns of life and is reborn into “forever,”

a state of consciousness that is complete and eter-

nal. As L. S. Dembo, in his essay, “E. E. Cum-

mings: The Now Man,” put it: “To die in time and

be reborn in timelessness is the poetic aim of life.”

This paradox of dying into life is a common one in

religious and mystical thought. It is found in this

poem by Rumi for example (quoted in Harvey’s

The Way of Passion):

To die in life is to become life.

The wind stops skirting you

And enters; all the roses, suddenly,

Are blooming in your skull.

This is a particularly interesting example since

the metaphor of the opening, rebirthing self as a

flowering rose is also used by cummings in the

poem under consideration: “you open always petal

by petal myself as Spring opens / (touching skil-

fully,mysteriously)her first rose.” Cummings re-

turns to this metaphor in the final stanza, but in a

clever twist he transcends it as he comes back for

the third time in the poem to the image of the

beloved’s eyes: “the voice of your eyes is deeper

than all roses.” In other words, the deepest truth

leaves all images and metaphors behind. It is truly

inexpressible, beyond the resources of language to

capture. But it can be intuitively known, and its

presence is always healing, even if the speaker has

“closed [him]self as fingers.” He would have

agreed with Rumi’s fellow Sufi poet Hafiz, quoted

inThe Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Mas-

ter, who in one poem to the divine wrote:

I have

Seen you heal

A hundred deep wounds with one glance

From your spectacular eyes.

This elucidation of the paradoxes of “some-

where i have never travelled,gladly beyond” does

not absolve the poem of some of its weaknesses.

Bode and others have accused cummings of in-

dulging in “casually semi-private writing” which

would be hard to explicate unless the poet himself

decided to explain it. It is difficult, for example, to

ascribe much meaning to “colour of its countries”

in stanza 5, or to avoid the conclusion that the

words were chosen largely because of their alliter-

ation. And the final line, “nobody,not even the

rain,has such small hands” also seems a very pri-

vate one. One is reminded of a lecture given by the

poet Robert Graves in 1955, in which he offered 1

pound in cash to any member of the audience who

could make sense of one of Dylan Thomas’s more

obscure lines. (Thomas is a poet who resembles

cummings at many points.) Of cummings’s line, it

might properly be asked, In what sense does rain

have hands, whether small or not? Be that as it may,

it would be churlish to end with harsh criticism of

a poem that moves so tenderly, so mysteriously,

and with such humility, into the realm of tran-

scendental love and spiritual knowledge.

Source:Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “somewhere i have

never travelled,gladly beyond,” in Poetry for Students, Gale,

2003.

William Heyen

In the following essay excerpt, Heyen reacts to

critical evaluations of Cummings by other critics

and calls “somewhere i have never travelled... ”

“among the finest and most profound poems on the

theme of love ever written.”

E. E. Cummings’ 100 Selected Poemswas

published in 1959. This selection, which includes

work from Tulips and Chimneys(1923) through

Xaipe(1950), was made by Cummings himself.

These were the poems, no doubt, that he consid-

ered his best and perhaps most representative. I’d

like to talk about a few of the lyrics in this volume,

and to move from them to critical considerations

that they inevitably raise.

I am now three sentences deep into my talk

and already almost forced to stop. For there is a

sense in which, from Cummings’ point of view,

from the assumptions and visions of his life and

life’s work, poems do notinevitably raise critical

considerations. Poems are poems, and they are to

be taken for what they are or are to be left alone.

And when mind starts tampering with them, Cum-

mings would say, we’ll have the same situation as

occurs in one of his poems when the “doting / fin-

gers of / prurient philosophers” poke and prod the

earth to no avail. In the first of his i: six nonlec-

tures(1953) Cummings quotes Rainer Maria Rilke:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

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