[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by e.e. cummings

I love this poem and it sounds especially beautiful when e.e. cummings reads it himself (video below).

I wonder why he used strange punctuation and capitalization. When he reads it, I see and hear the words “normally.” When I see it on the page, the markings and lack of capitals, periods, etc. seem kind of distracting, but I know he had a reason. From what I’ve read, critics believe he did it to be purposely jarring. He is also often called “childlike,” and I could see a child experimenting with punctuation marks and capitals like this. A critic said that he saw poems as visual and the use of the marks were a part of that.

I just recently started trying to notice the visual aspects of a poem, where it is on the page, lines beginning and ending in different places and what that might mean. It’s kind of interesting to wonder. Looking at the title of this poem, I noticed brackets around it with parentheses inside, kind of like the words being held inside the brackets and then the parentheses inside that — carried within carried.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Source: Complete Poems: 1904-1962 (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991)