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somewhere i have never travelled by E. E. Cummings

By T.

25 December 2005

4.26k

somewhere i have never travelled
E. E. Cummings

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
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
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 colour of its countries,
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

MARGINALIA

And now for love:

ABOUT E. E. CUMMINGS

Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard, and his earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). In 1922 he published his first book, The Enormous Room, a fictionalized account of his French captivity. Cummings’ first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys, appeared in 1923. Another collection quickly followed: XLI Poems, also in 1925. By the time of his death in 1962 Cummings held a prominent… (more)