Advanced textual analyses: E.E. Cummings – When Life Is Quite Through With
E.E. Cummings – When Life Is Quite Through With
when life is quite through with and leaves say alas, much is to do for the swallow, that closes a flight in the blue;
when love’s had his tears out, perhaps shall pass a million years
(while a bee dozes on the poppies, the dears;
when all’s done and said, and under the grass lies her head by oaks and roses deliberated.) Stylistics is an excellent method of text analysis that helps us support our own interpretations of a text. At the same time, it helps us understand why the words we read generate certain feelings and explains parts of text that otherwise we might not understand properly.
The text I am going to analyse is a poem by E.E. Cummings, When Life Is Quite Through With. I have chosen it for its impressive musicality and symmetrical structure. It appears to be a sad song about the end of life, though not necessarily about death. The word death is not mentioned at all. Death is only suggested as a possible continuation of life in nature: the swallow closes a flight in the blue, the bee dozes on the poppies, her head lies under the grass.
Cummings uses semantic deviation to foreground the above-mentioned ideas. For instance, a swallow cannot actually close a flight in the blue, so this possibly suggests a clear sky, the place where one goes when one’s life ends. The inversion of the common word order in “all’s done and said” is another example of semantic deviation.
Syntactic deviation is present in the second and third stanzas, where the predicate precedes the subject of the sentence: shall pass / a million years, lies her head.
No word is capitalised in the whole poem (internal deviation), but there is a semicolon at the end of the first two stanzas, while the third stanza ends with a full stop.
In this poem, parallelism is the main means of foregrounding. Graphological parallelism is obvious in all the three stanzas. They all begin with the adverb “when” and
when life is quite through with and leaves say alas, much is to do for the swallow, that closes a flight in the blue;
when love’s had his tears out, perhaps shall pass a million years
(while a bee dozes on the poppies, the dears;
when all’s done and said, and under the grass lies her head by oaks and roses deliberated.) Stylistics is an excellent method of text analysis that helps us support our own interpretations of a text. At the same time, it helps us understand why the words we read generate certain feelings and explains parts of text that otherwise we might not understand properly.
The text I am going to analyse is a poem by E.E. Cummings, When Life Is Quite Through With. I have chosen it for its impressive musicality and symmetrical structure. It appears to be a sad song about the end of life, though not necessarily about death. The word death is not mentioned at all. Death is only suggested as a possible continuation of life in nature: the swallow closes a flight in the blue, the bee dozes on the poppies, her head lies under the grass.
Cummings uses semantic deviation to foreground the above-mentioned ideas. For instance, a swallow cannot actually close a flight in the blue, so this possibly suggests a clear sky, the place where one goes when one’s life ends. The inversion of the common word order in “all’s done and said” is another example of semantic deviation.
Syntactic deviation is present in the second and third stanzas, where the predicate precedes the subject of the sentence: shall pass / a million years, lies her head.
No word is capitalised in the whole poem (internal deviation), but there is a semicolon at the end of the first two stanzas, while the third stanza ends with a full stop.
In this poem, parallelism is the main means of foregrounding. Graphological parallelism is obvious in all the three stanzas. They all begin with the adverb “when” and