Spring is like a perhaps hand

Any examination of Cummings’s “Spring is like a perhaps hand” would be incomplete without mentioning nature. Despite the poem’s formal innovation and subversion of typical simile structure, it is still—at its core—a nature poem. Like many poets before him, Cummings composes a reflection on the coming of spring and the impact and importance of nature to the imagination.

“Spring is like a perhaps hand” illustrates a natural world characterized by care, artistry, and possibility. Spring—and, by extension, nature as a whole—seem to appear “out of Nowhere” (Line 3), and yet it “chang[es] everything” (Line 9). E.E. Cummings anthropomorphizes nature, meaning he gives it human characteristics. In Cummings’s poem, nature has both intention and precision. The poem does not give nature’s acts motivation or explanation, but implies an instinctive or primordial force. However, the care and hesitation— “[spring] mov[es] a perhaps / fraction of flower” (Lines 16 – 17)—imply a kind of mind behind nature’s actions.

Cummings’s poem creates a portrait of nature as both primordial and careful, inevitable and artful. While spring may “come[ ] carefully / out of Nowhere” to do its unstoppable work, it performs this work with the intention and subtlety of a single hand changing a window arrangement.