21 pages • 42 minutes read
[love is more thicker than forget]
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Literary Devices
Form
Given that across nearly 40 years of productivity E. E. Cummings established a reputation for experimenting with eccentric, even playful poetic forms—shifting line length with reckless abandon; spacing out words within lines; even using typography and shape poems to create an image on the printed page that suggested the poem’s topic—“love is more thicker than forget” seems relatively ordinary. The lines are nearly exactly measured; the poem is itself four neat and tidy quatrains; there is a suggestion of conventional end rhymes, although in some cases—“alive” and “forgive” (Lines 10, 12), for instance, or “only” and “sunly” (Lines 13, 15)—they are sometimes sight rhymes, that is, words that look like they ought to rhyme but are actually pronounced differently. Save for the lack of capitalization and end punctuation and the regular indulgence of irreverent trickery with grammar and neologism, the poem’s form is remarkably unremarkable.
Given Cummings’s willingness to create eccentric forms and reimagine how a poem looks, how a poem is built, why such a relatively conservative structure? The topic, the breadth and depth of love, is for everyone, anyone. Cummings’s readership here is wide. Eccentric forms can become gimmicky and even distracting, should he have, say, sculpted irregular lines that would have shaped, say, a heart. By creating a poem that appears ordinary and yet speaks in lines that are extravagant and experimental, daring and riotously un-ordinary, Cummings captures in form the same sense of paradox and contradiction he argues are the essence of love itself. The poem then is like love itself: at once ordinary and extraordinary, conventional and eccentric, accessible and perplexing, cliché and fresh.
Meter
Poems draw on the manipulations of meter to sustain the feel of music. Poets manipulate beats within lines to create a rhythm to the poem, each line of a poem kind of like a line of music with its regular beats and rests creating a sonic event. Because the poem appears to be regular, even convention in form—its lines tightly measured, the rhyme scheme deftly maintained—the assumption might be that the lines, in turn, would maintain the percussive regularity typical of metered verse, the patterning of stressed and unstressed syllables to create a musical flow and to aid in recitation.
Cummings abandons such conventional metrics. No line sustains a measurable and regular beat that, in turn, works with and against the next line. Although readers have drawn parallels between Cummings’s playful experiments with language and the verse of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) a generation later, this poem is unlike Dr. Seuss’s in that it rejects the polite and happy beat of meter. The poem offers no end punctuation. One line can move easily, effortlessly into the next. To suggest the precarious and unpredictable nature of love itself, the poem’s meter refuses easy symmetry and safe, predictable, anticipated beats. Like a heartbeat jolted with a person who falls in love, the meter here is jagged, upended, irregular. To recite the poem, again unlike reciting Dr. Seuss, in which the meter becomes the end all of the poem, here the recitation must negotiate new rhythms in every line, allowing for lingering over certain phrases, unscheduled stops, and opportunities to rush when ideas are related as a way to build momentum, allowing for new recitation experience every time the poem is engaged. How else, the poem asks in all but words, to write a love poem?
Voice
Who offers all the wisdom in this poem? It would be easy to assume the speaker is Cummings himself, that he speaks from poet to reader. But the voice defines itself through language and syntax. Who are we listening to? In the end, the speaker defies direct and simple definition. The speaker is given no context, no narrative to explain why the speaker feels the urgency to meditate on the complex reality of love. Given the paradoxical nature of love the poem captures, how the poem offers an argument that both celebrates and cautions against and about love, the speaker could just as easily be giving a toast at a wedding reception surrounded by flowers and happy people as be hunched over a warm beer in the night-world of a singles dive.
It works as both a celebratory wedding toast and a heartbreaking country western song because the voice refuses to simplify love as one thing or another. The voice assumes a certain wealth of experience that justifies the wisdom offered. Given the complexity and playful anarchy of the poems’ diction and syntax, the speaker is one who rejects the tyranny of expectations and the iron logic of authority. That no one can tell this speaker how to sculpt a poem—that level of confidence, the very refusal to use words that are words or write sentences that are sentences—creates about the voice a thrilling sense of a rouge poet, uninterested in mouthing conventional wisdom. That resistance to convention signals a voice that can be trusted to be honest, direct, and as uncompromising as the form of the poem itself.
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