Title
Author(s)
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings's "somewhere i have never travelled, g
ladly beyond" and Other Poems
Keane, Kevin
Editor(s)
Citation
Issue Date
URL
言語文化学研究. 英米言語文化編. 9, p.27-39
2014-03-31
http://hdl.handle.net/10466/14274
Rights
http://repository.osakafu-u.ac.jp/dspace/
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’s
“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”
and Other Poems
Kevin Keane
In this paper I will explore E.E. Cummings’s view of love and Eros as
seen in his poetry.Cummings is interested both in love as an ideal and sex as
a pleasurable activity. In Cummings’s works there is no absolute dichotomy
between love and sexuality. His sense of love is not completely pure; it has
erotic elements, too. Likewise, his erotic poetry can be graphic at times, but
it also shows feeling of warmth towards the prostitutes that appear in those
poems.
The psychologist Rollo May discusses the different kinds of love in his
book Love and Will. In the beginning of the book he discusses the different
kinds of love: sex, Eros, philia, and agape. Sex is lust and Eros is “the
drive of love to procreate or create—the urge, as the Greeks put it, toward
higher forms of being and relationship” (37). Philia is friendship and agape
is something akin to charitable feelings. May calls agape “the love which
is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of
God for man” (37-38). He goes on to say that “Every human experience
of authentic love is a blending, in varying proportions, of these four” (38).
Cummings’s sort of love may not be quite as ideal as that, but he at least
managed to blend love, Eros and sexuality in his creative, passionate life.
I would prefer to go along with Freud’s theory of Eros. Love, as most
of us regard it, is just romantic love or love for family, friends, country or
fellow human beings. To Freud Eros is the great life-force, which includes
self-preservation, love, and sex.1
First I will treat the positive and then the negative sides of love in
28
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’
s“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”and Other Poems
fully experienced both love and sexual desire in his life.
1. The Positive Side of Love
I will begin by examining Cummings’s poems about love, which are
often addressed to one of his three wives.2 Many of these poems have a
positive, optimistic tone.
One of the more paradigmatic poems in his opus, “somewhere I have
never travelled,gladly beyond” quoted below, is intended for his wife
Anne Barton. In his view, his beloved is like a wonderful world which he
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
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
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or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
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the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
Kevin Keane
29
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
(65)
His love for Anne is a world beyond his experience. At one point he says
she opens his heart up just as spring opens up a rose:
your slightest look easily will enclose me
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
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Cummings believes that Anne’s very fragility is more powerful than
anything in life. The “voice” of her eyes is deeper than anything he can
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Another poem, “yes is a pleasant country,” also emphasizes the positive,
transformative power of love. He associates love with spring as in “let’s open
the year” (67). Even if it is wintry he wants to start the year with her:
yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year
both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear
(67-68)
30
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’
s“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”and Other Poems
He associates love with spring as in “violets appear” (67) and in his mention
of April:
love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april’s where we’re)
(67)
Cummings often prefers emotion to reason, so he speaks of love as a deeper
season than reason. Love is part of the world of emotion for him. Love
refreshes him and makes the world seem brand new, just like the sense of
renewal that comes with spring.
In this poem the word “yes” is practically synonymous with love
her he is inferring that even if times are tough (“wintry”) he wants to feel
refreshed through his love for Anne. Together they make spring—that is, a
better life.
In addition to the poems above, “O Distinct” concerns the transformative
power of love. Cummings states that he is unkempt and untrue but proposes
that he and his lover look together at this doomed life; it is better to do so
together than separately. The poet means to say that they should live and love
each other despite the adversities of life:
Distinct Lady
swiftly take
my fragile certain song
that we may watch together
how behind the doomed
exact smile of life's
placid obscure palpable
carnival where to a normal
melody of probable violins dance
Kevin Keane
31
the square virtues and the oblong sins
perfectly
gesticulate the accurate
strenuous lips of incorruptible
Nothing
under the ample
day under the noise of worms
(63-64)
Through their love they can transcend this dirty life and find spiritual
The poem “silently if,out of not knowable” for its part speaks of
the sense of renewal that Cummings finds in love. He asserts here that
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giving him a new and purer life:
yours is the light by which my spirit's born:
yours is the darkness of my soul's return
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She is everything to him; it is a very intense kind of love.
In the poems above Cummings is generally looking at love in a very
idealistic way. In the next section I analyze some poems that show a darker
side of love.
2. The Negative Side of Love
Cummings may seem overly optimistic and idealistic about love, but he
is actually all too aware of its negative side. The following poems are not too
sanguine about love and its temporary nature.
Besides dying and in that way ending love, people can fall out of love or
be physically separated from the ones they love. We can see how separation
32
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’
s“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”and Other Poems
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it is so long since my heart has been with yours
shut by our mingling arms through
a darkness where new lights begin and
increase,
since your mind has walked into
my kiss as a stranger
into the streets and colours of a town—
that i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudities
$#'
coins His most gradual gesture,
and whittles life to eternity
—after which our separating selves become museums
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He experiences separation from the one that he loves as a kind of
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the end. Separation makes him feel that love has lost its vitality. He needs to
have his lover by his side for his love to feel alive. Fond memories just will
not do for him; they have to have reality in the present.
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without his love by his side:
33
Kevin Keane
my selves go with you,only i remain;
(an almost someone who's noone)
a noone who,till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning
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He means that his heart went with his lover when she went away. Now there
is nothing left inside; he just feels empty.
Cummings expresses his idea about love and separation the best in the
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presence of our lover. When we are separate we are not whole, just empty.
This notion is reminiscent of the Platonic myth of the androgyne. Plato
thought that each of us was originally composed of two people, man and
woman, joined together but later we become separate and feel unfulfilled.
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Cummings feels this on the personal level. When he is separated from his
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We have seen that Cummings can be realistic—even pessimistic—about
love at times. In the next chapter I will show that he has the same mixed
feelings about sexuality that he has about love.
3. Sexuality
Cummings wrote numerous erotic poems in addition to the love
poems. We can see that he has feelings of ambivalence about sex or at least
34
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’
s“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”and Other Poems
prostitutes.
The poet had sex with a prostitute only once in Paris, but he knew many
ladies of the night in Massachusetts and Paris, where he stayed after World
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of prostitution was taboo for him, but he gradually came to be fascinated by
prostitutes. He was generally too worried about venereal disease to have sex
with them, but he talked to and observed many of them. Richard Kennedy
notes that Cummings felt disgust and regret about prostitutes, but he could
also appreciate their work (Selected Poems 85-84). In the poems below we
can see both his attraction to these women and his disapproving attitude
towards them.
First I will analyze some poems in which Cummings expresses his
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he says that:
twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once
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eyes say the breasts look very good:
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thirteen pants have a hunch
admit in threedimentional distress
these hips were made for Horizontal Business
(set on big legs nice to pinch
assiduously which justgraze
each other). As the lady lazily struts
(her
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Kevin Keane
35
of unmarketable excitation,
whose careless movements carefully scatter
pink propaganda of annihilation
(87-88)
He states that:
eyes say the breasts look very good:
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Here he shows his appreciation for a prostitute's sexiness and physical
beauty.
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Lucienne which dangle
the old men and hot
men se promènent
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These poems with their innovative style (such as mixing French and
English in the case of the Paris prostitutes) show that these women excited
and inspired him.
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depicts the young, sexually precocious Kitty:
Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
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The babybreasted broad “kitty” twice eight
—beer nothing,the lady’ll have a whiskey-sour—
36
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’
s“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”and Other Poems
whose least amazing smile is the most great
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Cummings clearly enjoys witnessing such sexuality, but he has doubts
about the life that these women lead. He even describes them as dead,
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night of making love they tend to look very tired and not at all glamorous as
they did the night before.
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(her
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of unmarketable excitation,
whose careless movements carefully scatter
pink propaganda of annihilation
(88)
Their exhaustion after servicing men all night makes them seem like
corpses. Reading this, we can comprehend that the opposite of Eros is
Thanatos. Eros is the great life-force, but it exists side-by-side with death.4
Sexual energy can take a toll on one's health, at least temporarily, like a
hangover after a night of drinking. In that sense, these women may seem
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they are dying.
More death imagery appears in other poems about the prostitutes. In
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He is again commenting on the corpse-like appearance of a little lady after a
Kevin Keane
37
long night. Surely he must be aware that the pleasure is generally all on the
part of the male customer. For the prostitute sex is just a miserable kind of
work. The women that the poet describes seem to enjoy the attention of men
but that is just at the start of work.
One could accuse Cummings of being voyeuristic5 or, paradoxically,
prudish. However, despite his feelings of disapproval, he is similar to
Toulouse-Lautrec making his paintings of dancers at the Moulin Rouge;
Cummings studies the women to portray them in words.
Conclusion
Based on the evidence of his poems, we can see that Cummings’s
philosophy of love resembles that of Plato, Freud, and May to some extent.
There are both spiritual and physical aspects of love in these works that are
reminiscent of the ideas of Plato and others.
As for the love poems, even though Cummings often speaks of souls
and hearts, he sometimes refers to his lover’s body. He mentions the
woman’s eyes, hands, smile or kiss. Love is a union of souls for Cummings,
but he wants the lover’s body as much as her heart. Indeed, when he writes
about the prostitutes we discover his physical attraction to their bodies and
appreciation of their sexual prowess despite his doubts about their way of
life.
It is interesting to note that, like many of us, Cummings often feels
uneasy about being separated from his lover. If the one that he loves is not
nearby he feels the pangs of loneliness. Erich Fromm observes that this sense
of anxiety stems from the sense of powerlessness of being separated from
another person:
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the
source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without
any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means
38
Love and Eros in E. E. Cummings’
s“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”and Other Poems
to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—
actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability
to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety.
The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his
separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.
(8)
Cummings in the poems in chapter 2 can feel great frustration whenever
his relationship feels unstable or is distant in nature as in “it is so long
since my heart has been with yours” and “your homecoming will be my
homecoming--.” Despite his idealism about the power of love in general,
he knows deep in his soul that everything in life is transient, including love.
(Indeed, he had three wives himself, as mentioned before.) Cummings’s
notions about love may not be so healthy or balanced as Rollo May would
have it but he definitely encountered or experienced the whole gamut of
Eros, love, and sexuality.
Notes
]
9
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Beyond the Pleasure
Principle
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2.
For more about Cummings’s wives, consult Richard Kennedy’s E. E.
Cummings’s Revisited !}
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Sawyer-Lauçanno’s E. E. Cummings’s: a Biography (London: Methuen,
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3.
For more information about Plato’s myth, see The Symposium (Oxford:
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bisexuality. This may be true enough, but one could also regard this
myth as an explanation of the human sense of existential aloneness,
which is overcome through the power of love.
4.
More can likewise be found about Freud’s theory of Thanatos in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle.
Kevin Keane
5.
39
In fact, Cummings was himself quite sexually active. He generally
preferred to make love to his wives, not prostitutes.
Works Cited
Cummings, E. E. Selected Poems. Richard S. Kennedy, ed. New York:
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Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle
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22
Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving
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Kennedy, Richard S. E. E. Cummings Revisited
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May, Rollo. Love and Will
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Plato. Symposium
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Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. E. E. Cummings: a Biography. London:
…
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