Sunday, April 7, 2013

Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

-E.E.Cummings

This is another poem recommended to me by my teacher, and it shares various traits with the other poem by E.E.Cummings poem I analyzed, making it interesting, if slightly difficult, to read. Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand uses obscure enjambment, which appears to have no particular purpose or pattern, either in line length or rhyme scheme. It also has a random use of capitalization, capitalizing words which are not proper nouns, or capitalizing words which were not capitalized before.
In addition, the poem uses the word "perhaps" in unnecessary and seemingly random ways. The phrases "Spring is like a perhaps hand", and "while/people stare carefully/moving a perhaps/fraction of flower here" have no particular reason to include the word "perhaps", and these two examples share no similarities in its placement, except for being after the word "a", and being before a noun. The poem also uses parentheses in unnecessary ways; they seem to be there only for the sake of being there. The three instances in which they appear do not seem to share any similarities, except for ending before the last word of a line, two of them ending on the last line of a stanza.
The theme of the poem is that spring changes things in nature without removing anything. The "hand arranging a window" is a metaphor, with "hand" representing spring, "window" representing nature, and "arranging" representing the change, without removing anything. In other parts of the poem, there are mentions of change and movement, but never removal.
Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand is much like E.E.Cummings' other works, which have an underlying meaning, but seem to have been written to be as strange as possible.

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