Broken and Complete: Actualities I

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Broken and Complete: Actualities I

On my first reading of "Actualities I", by e.e. cummings, two anomalies were immediately apparent. The adjectives and adverbs used to describe the events in the poem were piled against each other, sometimes four and five adjectives and adverbs with no break. The use of cumulatively descriptive words was confusing. I had to slow down to absorb each new definition and reconcile it to each preceding definition. The second anomaly was the bizarre rhyme sequence, which at first appeared almost without any structure, and on closer examination revealed what may have once been the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet jammed into a blender and the results hastily rearranged. These two abnormalities (confused rhyming structure and piled descriptors) are closely related. They refer to each other heavily within the context of the poem and serve to illustrate a moment or feeling, which Cummings reveals as his purpose, entitling the series "Actualities".

The opening line of the poem, "a thing most new complete fragile intense," is an excellent example of the confusion created by piling adjectives one after the other. The difficulty is not, as I first suspected, that Cummings uses adjectives that directly contradict each other. Instead, the difficulty is that the words have connotations that directly contradict each other. Throughout the poem, Cummings puts together groups of words which seem uncomfortably like gibberish because of their associated meanings. Examine several phrases from the poem and some of their contradictory connotations:

format:

(line #) "poetic schmoetic" - [(connotation 1A, connotation 1B), connotation 2]

(line 1) "complete fragile" - [strong, weak]

(line ...

... middle of paper ...

...most new complete fragile intense, A

2 which wholly trembling memory undertakes B

3 -your kiss, the little pushings of flesh, makes B

4 my body sorry when the minute moon C

5 is a remarkable splinter in the quick D

6 of twillight

7 . . . . or if sunset utters one C

8 unhurried muscled chromatic D

9 fist skillfully modelling silence A

10 -to feel how through the stopped entire day E

11 horribly and seriously thrills F

12 the moment of ethusiastic space G

13 is a little wonderful, and say E

14 Perhaps her body touched me, and to face G

15 Suddenly the lighted living hills F

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