Trust Your Heart If The Seas Catch Fire By E. E Cummings

A mid-20th century poet famed for his avant-garde style of free verse poetry was a poet by the name of E.E. Cummings (commonly stylized as e.e. cummings). He was known for his disregard of grammatical norms; for example, proper capitalization and punctuation usage, and he would oftentimes combine multiple words into one, which gave his poetry its distinctive style. He also had an unusual way of formatting his poems, using line spacing atypical of what was commonly employed by other free verse poets of the day. His poems are generally short, witty musings on life, spirituality, nature, and women. They can also be deceptively simple, meaning that it seems like there might be a deeper meaning to the poem, but in reality they are just as simple as they look. This poem, dive for dreams, was published in Cummings’ 1958 collection titled 95 Poems. It is a poem that encourages others to follow their dreams and to live a life without regrets.
The first half of the first stanza says “dive
for dreams/or a slogan may topple you”, which is a way of saying to go for your dreams now or you might die before you can. A slogan is something commonly used in advertising, but it can also be defined as a type of battle cry, therefore the conclusion that you might die before you got the chance to go after your dreams, i.e. you die in battle, also known as life, could be drawn here. There is also the idea that if you are only living your life by slogans, you are not living much of a life, in which case Cummings is trying to tell us to live our lives to the fullest.
In the second half of the first stanza, the line says “(trees are their roots/and wind is wind)”. This could mean that trees are only as strong as their roots (the same sort of principle of the chain that is only as strong as its weakest link). So if people are only as strong as their roots, and they do not have strong roots, the wind, or troubles in life, can rip them out of place if they don’t have roots they can rely on. Another interpretation of “(trees are their roots/and wind is wind)” is that things are essence of themselves. The essence of things cannot be changed, therefore you cannot change the essence of yourself. In that case, he could also be saying that you are yourself and you need not try and change that.
The second stanza, is one of the strongest examples of Cummings’ use of metaphor, which he uses throughout this poem and numerous others.
The first lines, “trust your heart/if the seas catch fire” is saying that you should follow your heart no matter what. The second half, “(and live by love/though the stars walk backward)”, is simply a repeat of the first half of the poem. Cummings wishes to drive home the point that you should always follow your heart. People are often symbolized as boats on the ocean, and the “sea” is often representative of life, so “the seas catch[ing] fire” is what it is like when life gets crazy or when it seems like everything is terrible and nothing is going your way. The “stars walk[ing] backward” has the connotation that everything is out of place and strange, since the stars never walk backward; they move in a set direction ever forward. Then again, it could also mean that the stars are aligning specifically for us, even if they have to walk backward to do
it.
The first line of the third stanza, “honour the past”, serves as a reminder to keep the past in mind but not to dwell too much on it. The second line, “but welcome the future”, is saying to be open to whatever might come your way in the future. The last half, “(and dance your death/away at this wedding”, urges us to live in the moment and not to worry about when our time may come, to enjoy the time we have when we have it. The “wedding” mentioned in the last line symbolizes the present moment, i.e. the wedding of the past and the future. The last half of the poem is essentially saying to live so much that we never give death a second thought until it is upon us.
The first line of the fourth stanza, “never mind a world/with its villains or heroes”, tells you not to worry about the world and what everyone else thinks, tying in with the last lines of the first stanza, “(trees are their roots/and wind is wind)”, with the idea that you do not need to change yourself to please others. The last line of the poem, “(for god likes girls/and tomorrow and the earth)”, means that there are always new things and possibilities and chances to grow. The parenthetical here is another good example of his use of metaphor. “Girls”, “tomorrow”, and “the earth” are all things that are symbolic of fresh starts, possibilities, and growth.
The biggest theme present in this poem is that of encouragement. The poem itself is basically advising someone to follow their dreams and to live a life without regrets. After all, the first line of the poem is dive for dreams. He is also encouraging the reader to be, just as they are, and to not change themselves in order for others to have a more (or less) favorable view of them. The other theme prominent in this poem is that of love.
Cummings’ use of form here is interesting. Each stanza in the poem is structured as follows, all lowercase and sans punctuation, save for his use of parentheses:
L1 – first half of a line
L2 – second half of the first line
L3 – (first half of a parenthetical
L4 – second half of a parenthetical)
There are many reasons as to why Cummings may have chosen to structure the poem in this way. He chose to ignore grammatical norms because he wanted the words of the poem to be what people were focusing on: the poem as a whole, visual experience, bare bones, straight to the heart of the message he wanted to convey. So his use of parentheses here is interesting. He may have intended the parentheticals to clarify the previous lines, as secretive asides, as a response to the previous lines, or simply to draw attention to those lines. More than likely they are intended as clarifying asides, much like a whisper, an extra reminder to clarify the first part of the stanza.