21 pages • 42 minutes read
[love is more thicker than forget]
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Themes
The Contradictions of Love
Although often criticized for being sentimental, even naïve, and adopting the naïve perspective of a child, Cummings here explores a most complicated and very adult perception of love. This is no simplistic celebration of the wonder of love. Love here is not simply one thing or another; it is neither joyful or tragic: rather it is a both, not an either/or. Love is joyful tragedy and tragic joy. It is an emotion that resists definition.
Far from being frustrated or flummoxed by love’s elusiveness, the speaker embraces those contradictions and abdicates entirely the idea that such an emotion could be contained in any single perception. In turn, the poem extends to the reader the opportunity to accept love as wonderfully painful and painfully wonderful. Both elements of the definition emerge as the best words can to capture the reality of an emotion that seems so entirely itself and its opposite.
Thus, love is both unforgettable and easily forgotten; it is a careless and reckless condition and the utmost expression of sanity; it is momentary and fleeting and permanent and abiding; it is great in its impact yet starts as nothing, a side glance, a chance encounter, a moment in the right place at the right time; it is everywhere, available for any open and vulnerable heart, and yet it is so rare that many go through life assuming it is not for them. Not willing to pretend that love can be caged by words, the speaker insists on allowing love to slip free of the efforts to define it. In allowing love itself to defy definition, the poem permits love its rich contradictions. The poem argues in the end that love is (im)possible to ignore, (im)possible to control, and (im)possible to define. In that tangle of paradoxes, the poem endows love with its wonder, its pain, and its magic.
The Joy of a Little Anarchy
Nothing about the poem suggests conformity. Everything about the poem, from its paradoxical perception of love to its idiosyncratic sense of language, suggests the joy of anarchy. Upon first read, the poem might intimidate, its abandonment of the most basic conventions of grammar and syntax can seem off-putting, even confusing. Other love poems, and Cummings was aware of the long tradition of love poetry back to Catullus, by comparison seem tidy, clean, accessible, and clear. Nothing about love, however, is tidy, clean, accessible, or clear. Cummings thus introduces the concept of the joy of a little anarchy.
There is a certain wild-eyed terror about the Cummings poem, a willingness to gleefully take a hammer and smash every preconception of a love poem back to the Greeks. For Cummings, love is both simple and complicated, and the poetic lines that attempt to suggest that must be themselves both simple and complicated. “love is more thicker than forget”—how many different ways does that single opening line toss a grenade into the kitchen of love poetry, upend assumptions, joyfully introducing a little anarchy as a strategy for suggesting the anarchy that the experience of love introduces into the heart, the mind, the soul of the lover? There is no capitalization, no punctuation, the comparative form (thicker) is reenforced with a grammatically irrelevant “more”; love, an abstract concept, is given texture, a thickness, a heft and weight; forget is used as a noun rather than a verb. It is, in short, chaos—but coolly controlled chaos, much like love itself. And yet it makes a simple point: disentangled, the line assures that love will never be forgotten. To capture that sense of love, the line here introduces the same kind of gentle anarchy that love itself brings to the unsuspecting but ultimately grateful heart.
The Transcendental Nature of the Universe
When, in the closing lines, the speaker assures that love is timeless and higher than the sky that is higher than the sky, the apparent redundancy, or even worse a slip into childish babble, actually reveals the poem’s complicated faith in an ideal plane that surrounds and surpasses the world registered by the senses.
The world, Cummings argues, and by extension love cannot endure to be simply what it is, an endless and pointless cycle of dust and lust. To a culture, indeed a world that had since the Enlightenment come under the persuasive sway of science with its implicit faith in a material world that can be observed into formulas and domesticated into laws of predictability and logic, Cummings cannot abide such a humdrum world, an objective, neutral environment that rewards investigation by yielding to predictability and transparency. If Cummings was versed in the intellectual arguments of his Modernists, he was as well deeply involved in the argument of American Transcendentalism, most formidably in the generous spirituality of Walt Whitman. The world is ours to learn, certainly, but not ours to understand.
Love, the speaker suggests in Line 10, is “less never than alive.” The argument rests on the sense of a universe animated not by forces charted by scientists but rather animated by the defiant kinetics of an energy we weakly term love, a feeling that is both abstract and concrete, both here and everywhere, both sensual and transcendent. Unlike gravity or water pressure or work or any other natural phenomena that science calculates, love cannot be calculated or even predicted—rather love is felt, love is all about and yet nowhere, love is never less than living. Here Cummings’s argument reflects his embrace of a Platonic vision central to Whitman himself, the faith that the material world is a reflection, admittedly gorgeous but still a shadow, of an ideal world. It is not that Cummings is some airy idealist denying the integrity of the real-time world. His metaphors of choice here, the ocean, the moon, the sun, the sky itself, all testify to his embrace of the thereness of the immediate world. And yet his vision suggests a sweeping sense of beyond, of the sea deeper than the sea, the sky wider than the sky, to suggest the tonic power of love itself.
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By E. E. Cummings
