Garrett
Kitchen
April
17th, 2013
in
a middle of a room by E. E. Cummings is a sorrowful poem about a man’s last
moments before suicide. At first I had trouble understanding with all of
Cummings’s odd uses of punctuation and in some place the lack or replacement of
a word. For example, “The is blond with small hands” Cummings didn’t use the
word man even though that is what I interpreted what he meant. he possibly
didn’t use the word man, because he wanted to convey that he man is about to
take his life and cease to exist, so he is no longer a man. Cummings also
replaces the word “the” with the word “a” in the first line of the first
stanza, “in a middle of a room” And in the last line of the first stanza he
replaces “himself” with “a” again. “smiling to a self.” “stands a suicide”
instead of saying stands a man about to commit suicide or stands a man,
Cummings chose to call the man a suicide. This could possibly stick with the
theme that the man is about to become nothing, and even now minutes before he
takes his own life he is not a man but a suicide. in the third line of the poem
it says: “sniffing a Paper rose” I think Cumming capitalized paper because he
wants to emphasize that the rose is not real, but made of paper. In the second
and third stanzas of the poem, which comes closely after the paper rose line,
the man speaks about the how and why the rose is paper.
"somewhere
it is Spring and sometimes
people are
in real:imagine
somewhere
real flowers,but
I can't
imagine real flowers for if I
could,they
would somehow
not Be
real"
(so he smiles
smiling)"but
I will not
everywhere
be real to
you in a
moment"
The
man not only speaks about: how the flower isn’t real, but somewhere it is
spring, so imagine real flowers. Following the imagine real flowers line the
man talks about how he can’t imagine real flowers because if he did they
wouldn’t be real. This line shows how sad and depressed he is, because even if
he imagined real flowers, they would
somehow not be real, and that is because he imagined them. Additionally, he
says “but i will not...” and the stanza ends. I think Cummings put this at the
end of a paragraph because he wanted it to be a part of the “for if I could,they would somehow
not Be real” part, so it goes they would somehow not be real, but I will not.
The reason the quote doesn’t end when the stanza ends is because it is a part
of another one. “but I will not everywhere be real to you in a moment” What the
man is saying is that the flower imagining doesn’t matter because he is about
to become not real, like the flowers, in a moment. At the end of the poem
Cumming puts this:
“(a moon
swims out of a cloud
a clock
strikes midnight
a finger
pulls a trigger
a bird flies
into a mirror)”
Once again the author uses “a” instead of
“the”. More importantly it is like the poem ends, and the parentheses signify
that this is an action not narration or the man speaking. The man stops
talking, and then this happens and so I think as soon as he finishes talking he
kills himself. I think this because of the “a finger pulls a trigger” part of
the final stanza. The ending of this poem is very eerie, because in the same
second the man kills himself it turns to midnight, a moon shows by coming out
of the clouds, and a bird flies into a mirror.
Great insights!
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