Postscript: E E Cummings

E E Cummings: "!blac"
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Several of Cummings's vertical poems have been noted as having "haiku-like" qualities. They do indeed, and we may start with those qualities. Here is one such poem:

!blac
k
agains
t

(whi)

te sky
?t
rees whic
h fr

om droppe

d
,
le
af

a:;go

e
s wh
IrlI
n

.g

There are many Japanese touches here. The vertical (kakemono) format puts the poem like a calligraphy scroll into the tokonoma (display alcove), and highlights it as a display object. The separation of words into letters, besides enhancing verticality, has the effect of prolonging the action described: slowing down the experience of the poem and letting the reader concentrate on its immediacy; another Zen feature. The initial exclamation point marks a first excitement at the start trees against sky, and the final period (on the ground, as it were) marks the end of the leaf's descent, a bit of dynamic connecting two static things; very Bashô. And another framing device, to emphasize the poem-object as such. All this is beautifully done, but it is perhaps fairly obvious.

Not quite so obvious is the grammatical distension, and it is here that we may come into Horatian territory. If we horizontalize and recollapse the wordstock of the poem, we get three periods (here marked by commas):

black against white sky trees, which from dropped, leaf a goes whirling

And if put into normal word order, we have

black trees against white sky, from which dropped, a leaf goes whirling

and it is obvious that the poem is produced from the normal order by reversing the order of the middle period, and by delaying certain elements in the other two periods. If we repeat the normal form, highlighting the two elements which are to be delayed in the final version, we get:

black trees against white sky, from which dropped, a leaf goes whirling

and it turns out that the grammatical structures which are subject to separation and delaying are: (1) the noun of an adjective-noun phrase, and (2) the article of an article-noun phrase. The same sort of grammatical separation is typical of Horace. Both the separations in Horace's Carmina 1/11 involve an adjective-noun pair.

Horace's separations cannot be accommodated in English without stretching English further than it normally goes, and drawing more attention to the separation itself than the device, as it occurs in Latin (where it is less drastic in its effect), poetically warrants. Cummings has here created a style in English which can accommodate Horatian separation, and which has a poetic use for the resulting delaying and concentrating effect.

Cummings had a classical education, and we suspect that these possibilities were suggested to him by exposure to Horace in the original.

 

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