i carry your heart

e e cummings

(1894 - 1962)

This is a bonus poem! Poetry Month ends today and I have one poem left. It, like the first poem of the month, is a love poem so they form nice bookends. They are also by modern American poets so that works, too.

Importantly, this final poem was submitted by Steph Clay who is a key support for our Poetry Month project.

We hope you have enjoyed poetry month. We certainly did.

I Carry Your Heart is a love poem without hesitation or reservation. It is driven by the reassuring joy of knowing that the loved one is always close - no matter the physical distance. You might have noticed that a number of spaces that would normally be between words are missing. In the poem this often happens just before a parenthesis. This is thought to convey the closeness of the two parties.

When we take some knowledge into ourselves we don't say we know something "by brain" which would be technically correct. We say we know it "by heart." The ancient Greeks believed that memorizing something was not a brain-based activity but rather it was the heart at work. It makes sense then that a poem about love and a special person would emphasize the role of the heart.

i carry your heart

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)

Here's what Steph had to add:

In the Spring of 2007, I had the great fortune of playing Elsa Stanhope in Illinois Wesleyan University's production of Susan Glaspell's Alison's House. As part of our research and building a community among the cast, our director had us bring in poetry to read out loud. I brought in this. As Rich mentioned, it's obviously a love poem, but in the context of this particular cast, which was made up of nearly all my favorite people from college, in our final semester, as we were about to embark on adulthood and our collective journey was ending, the poem took on an even greater meaning for me; and by the tears everyone was shedding by the end, I think I can safely say, for all of us. It's popped up at weddings of college friends and in beautiful handmade gifts since, but to me, I will always see all of us sitting around that table with a mutual understanding of how much we meant to each other, and the promise that we'd keep each other in our hearts no matter where we went.

I had the thought to talk about the use of lower case writing (which is what you'd typically find when looking up poetry by e e cummings), however, it turns out it wasn't his doing - it was his publishing house, made trendy during the 60's. Ah well, I love it anyway.

Have a listen to the poem being recited, or check out the scene from In Her Shoes where Cameron Diaz recites it as a gift for her sister, Toni Collette, at her wedding.

Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was imprisoned in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room in 1922.