Spring is like a perhaps hand

E.E. Cummings opens his untitled poem with the line “Spring is like a perhaps hand” (Line 1), a straightforward simile, aside from the curious usage of “perhaps.” The word “perhaps” functions in multiple ways. In one sense, “perhaps” may be read as a real-time corrective reflection by the speaker: Spring is like a—perhaps—hand. Because “perhaps” appears only after the article “a,” the caveat is infused with hesitation. The speaker begins their statement as a declaration, only to bisect the noun phrase with a marker of uncertainty. On this read, the “perhaps” functions like the speaker interrupting themselves mid-speech. However, the more dominant interpretation of the line (supported by later, more determinate repetitions of the device) sees “perhaps” used not as an adverb but an adjective. In this reading, “a perhaps hand” (Line 1) is a single, unbroken noun, where spring is compared to a hand of uncertainty, a hand which inquires into alternative possibilities of all it touches, a “perhaps-hand.”

When the reader has just had time to absorb these two meanings, layered on top of one another as they are, the poem interrupts its own thought once again—this time with a parenthetical statement.