[Music]
"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.
Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.
Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life
which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.
I carry your heart.
I carry it in my heart."
Of all the many highly experimental poems by E.E. Cummings,
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] is among the most straightforward and approachable.
It's the one you're most likely to hear at weddings or at weddings in rom-coms.
"I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart."
And because this poem seems effortless, it seems pulled out of time, too.
I think that was what Cummings wanted, to make this poem universal, the quintessential love poem
for the modern age.
I mean, just take a look at the five concrete images that he uses.
Hearts, moon, sun, tree, stars. It's hard to imagine five symbols more archetypal.
So, the intention here is clearly universal appeal.
But that's not a slight on the poem's construction or its meaning. Just the opposite, in fact.
As Yeats once brilliantly wrote about his own craft,
"A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."
So, first, let's take a look at the formal construction of "i carry your heart".
The first thing to notice is that the poem is split into two overlapping parts:
Everything that's outside the parentheses and everything that's inside them.
This follows the theme set up in the first line, the theme of the narrator's lover
being contained within his heart and vice-versa.
This reciprocal relationship is hammered home in the first stanza with,
"anywhere i go you go," and "whatever is done by only me is your doing."
Every statement in this poem is followed by a parenthetical statement
and frequently, key words used outside of them are found inside as well,
linking the two parts and the two people.
Parentheses are the perfect punctuation to use because visually, they actually represent the image
of containment.
As critic Roi Tartakovsky has observed, Cummings finds several poetic functions from the parantheses
throughout his work, whether it's to convey intimacy or protection or to give a direct address to the subject
or like we just discussed, to use its crescent shape as an icon in itself.
Indeed, as Tartakovsky notes, parentheses have a somewhat contradictory place in all our writing.
Formally, they are supposed to contain "throwaway information", stuff that would theoretically
be perfectly okay to leave out.
But because of this, because they don't have to be there and yet still are,
parenthetical comments call attention to themselves, foregrounding their contents
while backgrounding them at the same time.
Ambiguity like that is exactly what Cummings loves to play with.
And it reinforces the poem's themes. Clearly, Cummings is using the parentheticals for intimacy.
You can see that in his additions of "my dear", "my darling", "my sweet", "my true",
but he also uses them to develop his philosophy of self and love.
See, for Cummings, love is a condition in which two fragmented selves come together to form
a more perfect unity.
And if there's one great theme in his collected work, it's the importance of being a truly transcendentally alive
individual against the dulling and alienating forces of modern progress.
But the individual self was always a problematic idea for Cummings.
Whereas sometimes, he avowed that man is, "a miraculously whole human being,"
elsewhere, like, in the same sentence, he says that man's "only happiness is to transcend himself."
Again and again, his poetry affirms that transcendence comes with losing the self in love,
whether it' said gracefully outright, like when he writes,
"losing through you what seemed myself;i find selves unimaginably mine."
Or it's demonstrated in some formal fireworks, like in this poem, where the "you & me"
is literally fused together and the speaker has difficulty determining what form of the verb is best to use.
Love's ability to transcend is the focus of "i carry your heart" and Cummings is using whatever he can
to explore different connotations of transcendence.
Just take a look at the third stanza. Love is literally a cosmic force that holds the stars in the firmament.
But it's also "the deepest secret", and Cummings suggests this deepness by nesting the secret
in parentheses, which are themselves nested into the poem, and the secret is buried further,
"[in] the root of the root and the bud of the bud." And the symbols I mentioned earlier,
sun, and particularly moon, are symbols of transcendence throughout his poetry.
I mean, what has the moon always meant to Cummings?
In a great essay by Cummings critic Martin Heusser, which I'll link to below,
the moon's significance is traced across several poems. It's variously described as:
"A remarkable splinter", "a dainty mademoiselle", "a watchspring", "a balloon", "a big red dog", "a mystery",
"as having small hands", and as "the shyest metaphor".
Cummings has a transcendental reverence for the moon, but he has a hard time pinning it down in language.
That's why it's the shyest metaphor. Any attempt to understand it, to know it,
will result in the symbol fleeing further away.
This is what the moon has always meant to Cummings, and it's the way he feels about love and poetry, too.
In his notes, which are collected at Harvard, he once wrote:
"To know is to possess, and any fact is possessed by everyone who knows it,
whereas those who feel the truth are possessed, not possessors."
Like the great American transcendentalists, Cummings believes truth and poetry and love
cannot be comprehended, only experienced.
With his poetry and all its intense experimentation, he attempts to short circuit our impulse toward knowing
so that we might experience language anew.
"i carry your heart" is a rare attempt at clarity. In form and content, it points toward love,
just as it points toward Cummings' philosophy.
But its true magic is in the way it unfolds effortlessly, in a rhythm and cadence harmonious with feeling.
[Music]
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