“i’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / that i almost believe that they’re real”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, what else but another cummings love sonnet:

if i have made,my lady,intricate, e. e. cummings

if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
                                  you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.


First published in his 1926 collection is 5.

---L.

Subject quote from Pictures of You, The Cure.

Comments

[graydon]

the keen primeval silence of your hair

Ow.

This is not at all the sort of thing I expect from Cummings. Now I kinda want there to be a comparative course with Cummings and Houseman.

[larryhammer]

Cummings in his lexical experiments sometimes throws out phrases that are surprising in a not quite so good way.

[graydon]

This one was more knowing precisely what he meant, or at least it felt that way, and the person to whom that remembered feeling applied being dead. (And the weather being the dank and dreary manifestation of fall.)

[larryhammer]

I get that.

[graydon]

thank you!

Single-word responses are not entirely optimal of comprehension.