A return, with poetry
Thank you all for being patient while I took the time to rest and recover from Covid. As a reminder, all subscriptions were paused when I wasn’t writing these, so if you are a yearly subscriber, the time I took off will be automatically added to your subscription (so it will be a year+ before you are charged for a renewal) and if you are monthly subscriber, the monthly fee wasn’t charged.
Since April is National Poetry Month, I am going to celebrate with a mini-series of posts about some of my favorite poems. My goal is just to share them with you, and talk a bit about why I love them, not to offer rigorous academic or critical analysis.
Today, I’d like to talk about “[All in green went my love riding]” by E. E. Cummings. I don’t remember exactly when I first read it, but what I do remember is that I loved it instantly, and that I was shocked when I realized it was by Cummings. It doesn’t have any of the things that I tend to associate with him – none of the idiosyncratic punctuation or capitalization, none of the creative use of page space or line breaks. And so that sort of feeling of this poem being an artistic departure became part of why I love it. (It might not actually be – I am not a Cummings scholar. But as I said, it felt like it, and that feeling was one of the things that focused my attention.)
The poem also feels to me like a ballad. Possibly perhaps because it is written in a ballad’s trochaic meter, but more because of its subject and setting – the green-clad beloved, riding out to the hunt at dawn. The repetition of “went my love riding” gives us an echo of a sung chorus, as does that of “four lean hounds crouched low and smiling” and what ran before them. There are other repetitions as well, until one wonders if what one is hearing is not a ballad but rather a spell – a net of words that winds tighter and tighter as the poem draws onto its end. This is, after all, a poem of pursuit, of a hunt. A deathly one, with famished arrows and the lover who tells it dead at the end.
Beautiful and tragic. Of course I love it.
For me, the fact that “[All in green went my love riding]” feels like a ballad, that it is a modern echo of an older form, makes the poem feel timeless. No, not timeless – out of time. A lover and a hunter and clad all in green, and I hear “Greensleeves” and “The Cruel Sister” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Whoso List to Hunt” all in the back of my head when I read it. And yet it was published in 1923, one year after “The Waste Land.”
But at the end of the day, I go back to what I said above – the poem is beautiful and tragic, so of course I love it. And while all the additional factors that go into my love are true, I also think it’s fine to let an analysis stop and end there – that here is a thing, and it hooked into me when I first read it, and that fascination hasn’t gone away.