Riehlife Poem of the Day: e. e. cummings’ “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”
When I was a young married woman computing to graduate school at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville in the 1970s before I went into Peace Corps in 1972, my husband and my best friend of that time got together to buy me the complete works of e.e. cummings. I was never so thrilled, and spent almost as many hours with his poems, enraptured, as I did with my schoolwork. (Same thing with Tolkien, but that is another story.)
Please click on the red text below to learn more about cummings and his work. The reviews on Amazon are among some of the best written and most heartfelt tributes I’ve read there. This is a man, a poet, that reached readers hearts and changed their worlds. Certainly, he changed mine. When we recently interred my sister Julia’s ashes, I read “Love is a Place” as my small piece of the service, and kept it as my pocket poem for days. I believe cummings is among the best of the world’s love poets and many of his 900 poems address the nature of love. Apologies that my blog structure doesn’t allow me to retain the original lineation of this lovely poem. I trust you’ll make the opportunity to read it in the library or in your own volume.—JGR
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i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
e. e. cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962)
The Complete Poems: 1904-1962
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
