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E. E. Cummings and
this poem I'm going to call the title L
Open Parentheses A, for the moment at least,
and s,o I will tell you that listening to this video lecture will be completely
unproductive unless you're looking at the poem with me
at the same time. So here's how you have to look at this poem
if you haven't caught this, and it's difficult to catch, so
don't feel bad if you didn't catch it. Look at the words
in the poem, and we look at the first line
and we have the letter L, open parentheses,
and then the letter A. So we have to think about this
home as having two parts: everything that's
outside the parentheses, everything that's inside
the parentheses because if you look downward, you have that one line, a
white space break, and you have the letter S
and a close parentheses sign, so let's look at everything
that's inside those parentheses, that parenthetical.
Going back up to the top, what we have is
"A" and "LE" then the next line
LED and then the next line "AF"
so we're forming words: "A Leaf."
Continuing on with that, "falls,"
and that's what's inside the parentheses a leaf
falls. Now, let's forget that everything inside the parentheses
is there, and let's look at everything outside the parentheses.
Well, you have that letter "L" and then
we go to the bottom. See that line
with "S" close parentheses? Well, below that: O N E
that goes with the "L," that's the first letter the poem "Lone"
another L, I N E S S. It spells the word loneliness.
So what we have is loneliness,
a leaf falls, and so thats
basically the entirety of the peom, so
you have this image of a leaf falling
and so, well, we can suppose, perhaps, that
that it's autumn, and we're heading into winter,
and so the leaves have turned color, and they're falling.
Not necessarily. . .green leaves during the spring and summer sometimes fall,
so we can't just assume it's autumn, but in any event, we can have the image
of, maybe, a tree perhaps in a forest, where a leaf is slowly
falling, falling, until it reaches the ground and settles there.
So this is, on the one hand,
an example of E. E. Cummings playing with
form. . .form on on the page. . .how the
the poem is delivered with that parenthetical and everything inside it
and everything outside it, but
what does the poem represent? Well, beyond
images that we could think about like the leaf falling
is the scene. . .perhaps loneliness. . .
when a leaf falls, whether it's autumn,
or spring, or summer, well, that leaf is
already dead or going to die, right? So is
the leaf a symbol for life?
For death? Would that be the theme of the poem?
So, you know, you do have some choices here.
At any rate, E. E. Cummings, as we can see,
is wonderful in terms of playing with form
and giving us a little bit of a puzzle to solve here.
Thank you.