Brendan Galvin and the late George Garrett briefly edited a mischievous journal intended to parody Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. If memory serves, it was called Poultry, A Magazine of Voice. Or maybe it was “voyce.” At any rate, in each issue they awarded a dubious prize to the most confusing poem they’d seen lately, and they conferred upon it the “What Him Say?” award. (Sounds like Chico Marx.) More than a few people would love to go through Cummings’ books and ask the question. However, I think Eslin almost always gives us more help than we see at first.
However, calling so many poems “poem” is not helpful, though when I see it, at least I know it’s not another bill I have to pay, though maybe it is an item on some bill of fare. And yet, here in our Poem of the Week is another under that title.
Sometimes Cummings (cap or lower case? I’m never sure how much I want to cooperate.) strips his language like somebody hand-skinning a limb (“withe,” if you like, something limber) of forsythia, willow, abelia to make a switch. Here, however, he embellishes, enumerating and coining toward what is, in fact, a mighty conventional sonnet form. An amatory sonnet, and once you’re on to that and start imagining some Romeo whispering it, you’re halfway there, but then there’s that internal sonnet machinery of echoes and winks to be fathomed.
When I catch someone writing “timelessness” twice and “time” four times in fourteen lines, I suspect I’m onto something. I’m assisted by the contrarian turns of “falsely true” and “undie.” A little Hardy there. And “hosts of eternity; not guests of seem”? A whiff of Emily. The opening simple question and overwhelming answer put me in mind of Rimbaud’s “Enivrez-vous.” When he asks what time it is, the French poet says it’s time to be drunk. (“With wine, with virtue or with poetry, as you will.”)
I am no exigete nor was meant to be, so I need to get out of this, maybe by saying those last three lines contrive a neat, intricate, very conventional claim for the love of the speaker and listener (as well as us eavesdroppers). What clocks can measure is small change compared to this forever-eternity “children, poets, lovers” run on. [In my experience, this is the opposite of Irish Time: these three species of beings come early, rather than late.]
Enough, but I would love to see how others parse this, even to see someone go through this piece (originally in Shenandoah in 1962) and follow the strands of negating phrases and deconstructing reversals. A paraphrase would be a paltry thing, but a diagram, now there’s a project. By the way, I’m pretty sure Cummings is pretty sure love and its time-twisting are better than a sharp slash with a switch, though to each his own.
