Rethinking Cummings' Poem
'somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond'
An astute reader has suggested that Cummings' poem would make more sense if the reader understands the speaker to be addressing a newborn baby instead of a lover.
In an earlier article, this writer interpreted Cummings’ “A Flawed Love Poem” according to the widely held notion that the speaker is addressing a woman/lover. The following is the result of rethinking the poem:
First Verse Paragraph: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond”
The speaker begins by claiming that there is a place where he has never gone but suggests that he would be glad to go there. He addresses his newborn child, whose eyes are unfathomable; the eyes do not give him any indication that they would like to “travel” with him. As a new parent gazes into the eyes of his/her newborn child, the parent cannot help but wonder what the infant is thinking and can only guess, as the speaker here does.
Nevertheless, any movement the baby makes opens him up only to possibilities. The speaker is moved by his love and the awesomeness of his responsibility; his feelings are so deep that he feels he cannot express them adequately.
Second Verse Paragraph: “your slightest look easily will unclose me”
Beginning in the first verse paragraph with the claim, “your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,” the speaker uses terms meaning “close” and “open” to suggest how the infant makes him want to open his emotions and possibly his soul to the child.
He says, “your slightest look easily will unclose me / though i have closed myself as fingers.” The baby’s quickest glance moves him, even though he had previously closed himself up as a hand makes a fist.
Then he likens his feelings to the opening of a rose in spring, implying that his emotional life has been closed, but this new baby motivates him to open his heart “petal by petal” as a rose opening in springtime to its natural surroundings.
Third Verse Paragraph: “or if your wish be to close me,i and”
The speaker’s emotions are so deep and strong that once the baby responds to his message, he will feel that his life is complete, and this completion will happen quickly and “beautifully.”
The speaker dramatizes his utter dependence on the response of his baby by comparing his feelings to “the heart of [a] flower imagining / the snow carefully everywhere descending.”
Once the parent/speaker knows that the infant can understand and return his affection, a calmness, represented by the softly falling snow, will envelope the speaker, cooling his intense anxiety.
Fourth Verse Paragraph: “nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals”
Then the speaker exaggerates, claiming that “nothing we are to perceive in the world equals / the power of your intense fragility.” His intense emotion may be almost equal to that power, but to the speaker, whose mental processes are nearly overcome by his emotion, he cannot, at this point, think that anything can be as intense as the “fragility” of his newborn child.
Fifth Verse Paragraph: “(i do not know what it is about you that closes”
The final verse paragraph closes by portraying the hands of the newborn as being so small that not even the rain that fondles the rose in spring has smaller hands. Parents universally are astonished when seeing the tiny fingers and toes of their newborn baby.
Commentary
While this poem is usually interpreted as a speaker addressing a woman/love, it lends itself quite well to reading it as a parent addressing his/her newborn baby. The intense emotion of a parent who has just been given the enormous task of nurturing a infant accounts for much in the poem that otherwise might sound exaggerated and overly sentimental.
