Notes on the Writings of E. E. Cummings

These notes are limited to elucidating allusions and / or quotations which might puzzle that elusive and very un-Cummings-like personage, the "general reader." I have tried—not always successfully—to avoid the temptation to interpret the poems.  I have not annotated allusions that most literate readers should know, nor have I deciphered all of Cummings' dialect spellings. For some suggestions on interpreting Cummings' visual and syntactic deformations, see "Deciphering Cummings"

To find notes to specific poems, click on book titles below, or scroll down to individual first-line"titles" of poems, highlighted in green.  Notes to the poems begin with the page number in Complete Poems (Liveright, 1994).

Poetry Tulips & Chimneys (1922 Manuscript) & [AND] (1925)  is 5 (1926)  W [ViVa] (1931)  No Thanks (1935 Manuscript)  New Poems (1938)  50 Poems (1940)  1 x 1 [One Times One] (1944)  XAIPE (1950)  95 Poems (1958)  73 Poems (1963)  ETC. (collected 1983)

Prose, Plays, etc. The Enormous Room [1922]  An on-line text of The Enormous Room Him [1927]  CIOPW [1931]  Eimi [1933]  Tom [1935]  Santa Claus [1946]  i: six nonlectures [1953]  Adventures in Value [1962]  A Miscellany Revised [1965]  Fairy Tales [1965]  A Works Cited List [Bibliography]  "Cummings' Titles" [from Spring 9]

Tulips & Chimneys (1922 Manuscript)

27. "in Just-"
goat-footed probably refers to Pan, Greek woodland deity.
Analysis by Iain Landles [Spring 10 (2001): 31-43]
"On 'in Just-'" (MAPS site)

53. "Humanity i love you"
It is instructive to consider why Cummings placed this poem first in a section called "La Guerre," poems about World War I. The following passage from i: six nonlectures seems relevant to the context of the poem:

Whereas—by the very act of becoming its improbably gigantic self—New York had reduced mankind to a tribe of pygmies, Paris (in each shape and gesture and avenue of her being) was continuously expressing the humanness of humanity. Everywhere I sensed a miraculous presence, not of mere children and women and men, but of living human beings; and the fact that I could scarcely understand their language seemed irrelevant, since the truth of our momentarily mutual aliveness created an imperishable communion. While (at the hating touch of some madness called La Guerre) a once rising and striving world toppled into withering hideously smithereens, love rose in my heart like a sun and beauty blossomed in my life like a star. Now, finally and first, I was myself: a temporal citizen of eternity; one with all human beings born and unborn. (53)

An annotated version of the poem
"A brief, pictorial history of Scollay Square"

flanging = "to furnish with a flange, a protruding rim, edge, rib, or collar."
woolworthian pinnacle = the Woolworth building, tallest before 1931. (See also 111. "at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o'clock" [CP1 201].) Some more views of the Woolworth building.

84. "one April dusk the"
Ο ΠΑΡΘΕΝΩΝ = "O PARTHENON" or "The Parthenon," the name of the restaurant.

89. "spring omnipotent goddess thou dost"
ragging the world --Robert Wegner writes, "I interpreted the words 'ragging the world' as meaning clothing the world, that is, urging the grass to grow, inducing leaves to emerge, buds to bloom. Cummings had no objection to this ancillary reading, but explicitly he wanted me to know that 'ragging, when I wrote the poem meant turning to ragtime(music;)syncopating'" ("Visit" 68). See also EEC's poem "ta / ppin / g" (CP 78).

90. "Buffalo Bill 's"
Buffalo Bill = William F. Cody (1846-1917). Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show enthralled audiences from 1883 to 1910.
More Links:

On-line criticism of the poem: "on 'Buffalo Bill's'" at the MAPS site.

110. "i was sitting in mcsorley's. outside it was New York and beautifully snowing." (CP1 96).  McSorley's is an ale-house at 15 East 7th Street in the East Village, founded in 1854 and still in business. The bar used to be for men only—women were first admitted in 1971.  Links: McSorley's Back Room (etching, 1916, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas) Joseph Mitchell, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.

John Sloan, McSorley's Bar (1912, Detroit Institute of Arts).

111. "at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o'clock" (CP1 201)
EEC goes to the top of the Woolworth building to view rush hour. Some views of the Woolworth building. See also 71. "as usual i did not find him in the cafés" (CP1 197)

116. "when i am in Boston,i do not speak" (CP1: 217)
When / In Doubt Buy Of = an electric sign, the rest of whose message is obscured by rooftops.
Kneeland, a street in downtown Boston;
hellas = Greece;
paklavaah meeah = my (?) baklava, a pastry described as "indigestible honeycake" in line eight.
ΜΕΓΆ ΈΛΛΗΝΙΚΟΝ ΞΕΝΟΔΟΧΕΙΟΝ ΎΠΝΟΥ = "MEGA HELLENIKON XENODOCHEION HUPNOU" = "Grand Greek Sleeping Hotel." No doubt a ("cindercoloured little") black and white tourist photo on the wall of the restaurant.

139. "Thou in whose swordgreat story shine the deeds" (CP1: 209)
Froissart = Jean Froissart (1338-1410?), French chronicler and historian.

160. [SONNETS--ACTUALITIES VII] "yours is the music for no instrument" (CP1: 84)
rathe = "quick in action, eager, vehement" or "early" (Heusser, I Am 175).
la bocca mia = "my mouth" [Italian]. Richard S. Kennedy points out that this passage alludes to Dante, Inferno V.136: "Francesca has told Dante that her love for Paolo began when they were reading the story of Launcelot and Guinivere together and suddenly 'la bocca mi bacio tutto tremonte' ([he], tembling all over, kissed my mouth)" (Dreams 237-238). According to Kennedy, like Paolo and Francesca, "the poet and his lady risk all eternity for love" (238). But Heusser sees death as the overwhelming threat in the poem.

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170. "—GON splashes-sink" (CP1 169)
Three letters (G, O, and N) from a large illuminated sign flash on the sink. What are the other letters of the sign? Could it be CALGON?
j'en doute,) chérie = "I doubt it, dear" [French].

184. "I remark this beach has been used too.    much Too.   originally"
flatchatte ringarom a .s = "flat chattering aromas."
c'est // l'heure // exquise = "it is the exquisite hour" [French]. Isabelle Alfandary notes that this phrase is the last line of poem 6 ("La lune blanche") in Paul Verlaine's collection La Bonne chanson (1870).
i remind Me of Her —Alfandary also notes that the English phrase is a literal translation of "je me la souviens," a common French phrase that is not found in Verlaine's poem. A more idiomatic translation would be: "I remember her." (See Alfandary, E. E. Cummings 63-64.)

189. "suppose / Life is an old man" (SP 117-118)
Life speaks French, of course: les / roses les bluets = "roses, bachelor's buttons"; Les belles bottes = "pretty bunches"; pas chères = "not expensive."

192. "here is little Effie's head" (SP 112)
In Spring 7, Alys Yablon notes that "Effie's name may perhaps be a play on the word 'ephermeral'" (51).
The six subjunctive crumbs may be derived from Gilbert and Sullivan's anti-feminist operetta Princess Ida. In the operetta, the princess of the title founds a college for women and vows that students and faculty will shut themselves off from all contact with men. Lady Blanche, the "Professor of Abstract Science" at the college, expresses her ambition to overthrow Princess Ida in the following way:

Oh, weak Might Be!
    Oh, May, Might, Could, Would, Should!
How powerless ye
    For evil or for good!
In every sense
    Your moods I cheerless call,
Whate'er your tense
    Ye are Imperfect, all!
Ye have deceived the trust I've shown
    In ye!
Away! The Mighty Must alone
    Shall be!    (264-265)

To answer this, it's meet that we consult
The great Potential Mysteries; I mean
The five Subjunctive Possibilities--
The May, the Might, the Would, the Could, the Should.
Can you resign? The prince May claim you; if
He Might, you Could--and if you Should, I Would!  (293-294)

195. "i will be"
dea d tunes OR s-crap p-y lea Ves flut te rin g should read "dea d tunes OR s-cra p-y lea Ves flut te rin g"-- EEC is writing "scrapy" not "scrappy." 

201. "(one!) // the wisti-twisti barber"
See Louis C. Rus, "Cummings' '(one!)'." Explicator 15 (1957), item 40. Rus notes how the grammatical ambiguities in the poem reinforce its message of oneness.

203. "O It's Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss" (SP 75)
Richard S. Kennedy notes that the poem quotes from a popular song sung by Harry Lauder in the British music halls:

Oh, it's nice to get up in the morning
 When the sun begins to shine,
 At four or five or six o'clock
 In the good old summer time.

But when the snow is snowing,
And it's murky overhead
Oh, it's nice to get up in the morning,
But it's nicer to lie in your bed!

207. "the bed is not very big"
et tout en face = "and right in front" [French];

poilu = "hairy, shaggy, furry" [French]. Milton Cohen suggests that the gaslight clothes the crucifix on the wall "in a sensuous, nappy fur" (Poet 131). But the word poilu was also a slang term for French foot-soldiers in World War I.

208. "the poem her belly marched through me as"
a trick of syncopation Europe has refers to James Reese Europe (1880-1919), pioneer bandleader and jazz composer. Gilbert Seldes wrote in The Seven Lively Arts that Europe had "that interior response to syncopation . . . to the highest possible degree" (156). See 239. [ONE-XII] "(and i imagine"

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228. [ONE-II] "Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal" (SP 152).
These notes are greatly indebted to Lewis H. Miller's "Advertising in Poetry: A Reading of E. E. Cummings' 'Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal'," Word & Image 2 (1986): 349-362. The title of Cummings' poem refers to a poem by Harold Vinal called "Earth Lover," from his first book, White April (1922), published in the Yale Younger Poets Series:

EARTH LOVER

Old loveliness has such a way with me,
That I am close to tears when petals fall
And needs must hide my face against a wall,
When autumn trees burn red with ecstasy.
For I am haunted by a hundred things
And more that I have seen on April days;
I have held stars above my head in praise,
I have worn beauty as two costly rings.
Alas, how short a state does beauty keep,
Then let me clasp it wildly to my heart
And hurt myself until I am a part
Of all its rapture, then turn back to sleep,
Remembering through all the dusty years
What sudden wonder brought me close to tears.

—Harold Vinal

230. [ONE-III] "curtains part"
Kirkland Street in Cambridge, Mass., just down the street from Cummings' boyhood home at 104 Irving Place.  

Professor Royce = Josiah Royce, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard College in Cummings' youth. In six nonlectures, EEC writes, "I myself experienced astonishment when first witnessing a spectacle which frequently thereafter repeated itself at professor Royce's gate. He came rolling peacefully forth, attained the sidewalk, and was about to turn right and wander up Irving, when Mrs Royce shot out of the house with a piercing cry 'Josie! Josie!' waving something stringlike in her dexter fist. Mr Royce politely paused, allowing his spouse to catch up with him; he then shut both his eyes, while she snapped around his collar a narrow necktie possessing a permanent bow; his eyes thereupon opened, he bowed, she smiled, he advanced, she retired, and the scene was over" (25). See also six nonlectures 29-30. Photo of Josiah Royce at right (tie not discernible?).

231. [ONE-IV] "workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy"
en amérique on ne boit que de Jingyale = "in america they only drink Ginger ale" [French]. Perhaps they also drink "only Jingo ale." kaka = crazy, shitty.

over there, over there = Part of refrain of George M. Cohan's popular song "Over There," praising American troops going to fight "over there" (in Europe) in World War I. Cummings' reference turns on its head the line from the song, "And we won't come back 'till it's over over there." For complete score and lyrics, click on image at right. For the complete lyrics and three audio versions of the song, see the "Over There" page at FirstWorldWar.com.
all the glory that or which was Greece = garbling of E. A. Poe's lines from "To Helen"--"Thy Naiad airs have brought me home / To the glory that was Greece, / And the grandeur that was Rome."
grandja / that was dada? Dadaism was a nihilistic anti-art movement begun in Zürich, Switzerland during World War I. By 1926, when Is 5 was published, the dada movement was a spent force. For the Dada movement's influence on Cummings, see Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives (165-187). For doubts about Dada's influence on EEC, consult Cohen, PoetandPainter (48; 248) and Webster, Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism (115-134).
what's become of Maeterlinck refers to the symbolist poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), author of the plays Pelleas and Melisande (1893) and The Blue Bird (1905). In 1922, Maeterlinck published a sequel to The Blue Bird called Les Fiançailles, but in later life his attention had turned increasingly away from drama towards scientific and occult topics. This line and the next also parody the first lines of Browning's "Home Thoughts from Abroad": "Oh to be in England / Now that April's there." (See the note for "MEMORABILIA.")
ask the man who owns one --advertising slogan for Packard automobiles.

232. [ONE-V] "yonder deadfromtheneckup graduate of a"
nascitur = the third person singular present indicative of the verb nascor, meaning that "he / she / it is being born, arises, originates, begins, is produced, springs forth, proceeds, grows, is found" [Latin]. cf 262. "voices to voices,lip to lip" and Him III.vi (132 / 126).

234. [ONE-VII] "listen my children and you"
(eheu / fu / -gaces Postu- / me boo // who refers to Horace, Odes, II.14:

Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,
labuntur anni nec pietas moram
rugis et instanti senectae
adferet indomitaeque morti:

239. [ONE-XII] "(and i imagine" As Norman Friedman notes in Spring 3 (1994): 124-125, this poem depicts a nativity scene.  angels with faces like Jim Europe = James Reese Europe (1880-1919), jazz bandleader and composer who worked in Paris during World War I. Friedman writes: "Alan Rich, in New York Magazine for June 12, 1978, says James Europe was 'a promising black composer who was murdered (by the drummer in his band) in 1919' (81). . . James Lincoln Collier, in The Making of Jazz (Delta, 1978), says, 'James Reese Europe, the kingpin of the Clef Club,' was among 'the first American black musicians of this period to reach Europe...as military bandsmen accompanying the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War" (314). Collier, readers of this Journal may recall, is a nephew of William Slater Brown, Cummings' companion in The Enormous Room. The plot thickens! Marshall W. Stearns, in The Story of Jazz (NAL Mentor, 1956, 1958), praises Europe: 'The earlier minstrel-concert-vaudeville orchestras of Wilbur Sweatman, Will Marion Cook, and James Reese Europe (the favorite of dancers Vernon and Irene Castle) were gradually supplanted [and diluted] by Vincent Lopez, Ben Selvin, Earl Fuller (with Ted Lewis), and Paul Whiteman, who supplied the 'new' jazz music, polished up for dancing....Lt. James Reese Europe...might have been the Negro Paul Whiteman if he had lived...' (113, 117). Leonard Feather, in The Encyclopedia of Jazz (Crown Bonanza Books, 1960), has an entry on James Reese Europe: b. 1881, d. 1919, 'stabbed to death in a night club altercation' (211).     Friedman further notes that the poem was first published "in 1922, in Secession (48). This nevertheless also dates the poem after Europe's death in 1919, which gives special poignancy to the reference, if indeed Cummings wrote it after Europe died. The effect remains, however, of the transcendent presence of the angels, in the midst of this coarse and mundane setting, being imaged via the epiphany of Jim Europe."      For more information on Jim Europe, click on the image and links at right, and / or consult Reid Badger's excellent A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe, (New York: Oxford UP, 1995).

Jim Europe's "Hellfighters" Band (with RealAudio clips)  Songs of James Europe James Europe Biography Military Music: Sousa and the Hellfighters Europe Gravesite Order Jim Europe CD  from Inside Sounds /  Memphis Archives  PO Box 171282  Memphis, TN 38187  Phone: 800-713-2150  Memphisarc@AOL.com

246. [ONE-XIX] "she being Brand"
Consult Fred Schroeder's "Obscenity and Its Function in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings," and Marks 74-75, Karen Alkalay-Gut, "Sex and the Single Engine: E. E. Cummings' Experiment in Metaphoric Equation," Journal of Modern Literature 20 (1996): 254-258, and especially Lewis H. Miller. Jr.'s "Sex on Wheels: A Reading of 'she being Brand / -new'," Spring 6 (1997): 55-69.

thoroughly oiled the universal / joint --a necessary operation with early motor-cars. For a discussion and illustrations, see Miller 60-61.
slipped the / clutch --like flooding the carburetor and "somehow" getting into reverse, this is a beginner's mistake.
i touched the accelarator --Miller writes that "the reference to the accelerator is not to the foot pedal but to the button-tipped hand throttle," which beginners were advised to use "for the first few days until the other details of driving had been mastered" (62-63).

249. "on the Madam's best april the" [ONE-XXII]
According to Robert Wegner, ["A Visit with E. E. Cummings" Spring5 (1996): 59-70] Cummings told him that this poem's "words are spoken by an illiterate Irish woman" (64). The woman is apparently a "cook."

254. "MEMORABILIA" [ONE-XXVII]
These notes are indebted to two items in The Explicator both entitled "Cummings' MEMORABILIA": Clyde S. Kilby, 12 (1953), item #15, and Cynthia Barton, 22 (1963), item #26. The title refers to Robert Browning's poem "Memorabilia," which begins, "Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?"

stop look & / listen = slogan posted on railway platforms.
Venezia = Venice; Murano = town near Venice where glass objects d'art are made
nel / mezzo del cammin' = "midway in the road [of our life]" --Dante, Inferno I.1.
the Campanile = bell-tower in the Piazza San Marco, Venice.
cocodrillo-- = "a large stone crocodrile which is part of a statue of St. Theodore on a tall column overlooking the Piazza San Marco" (Barton). Baedekers = travel guides.
de l'Europe // Grand and Royal = names of hotels in Venice.
their numbers / are like unto the stars of heaven --After Abraham showed his faith in the Lord by being willing to sacrifice his only son Isaac, an angel promised to multiply his "descendants as the stars of heaven" (Genesis 22: 17). See also Genesis 15: 1-6.
Ruskin = John Ruskin (1819-1900), author of The Stones of Venice (1851-53).
thos cook & son British travel bureau with offices throughout Europe: the company issued travelers' checks and organized tours.
(O to be a metope / now that triglyph's here) Parody of the first lines of Browning's "Home Thoughts from Abroad": "Oh to be in England / Now that April's there."

Clyde Kilby writes that a metope and triglyph "are architectural terms and describe a portion of a Doric frieze, the metope being the decorated section between the triglyphs." They are usually placed horizontally in alternation on the lintels of Greek buildings like the Parthenon. The triglyph consists of three vertical lines contained within the two horizontal lines of the lintel. Lou Rus has suggested that the metopes should be seen as the open "space for creating a new art," which exactly corresponds with the etymology of the word. The Greek metope means "between or amidst the opae or tie-beams (rafters)." Vitruvius explains when that ancient carpenters "cut off the projecting ends of the beams" the butt ends flush with the wall "had an ugly look to them, [so] they fastened boards, shaped as triglyphs are now made, on the ends of the beams, where they had been cut off in front, and painted them with blue wax" (107). Vitruvius says further: "The Greeks call the seats of tie-beams and rafters opae, while our people call these cavities columbaria (dovecotes).  Hence, the space between the tie-beams, being the space between two "opae," was named by them metope" (108). "Seat" must be where the beams cross another member, creating an opening or space between the beams. The Greek word ope, opai means just what it sounds like, "open, openings." These empty spaces were often filled with art--little bas-relief sculptures, for example. So "to be a metope" could mean to be in that space where new art is created, to be alive art and not dead (and misunderstood) history. It could also mean, simply, "to be art"--to be those little sculptures rather than a rigid and decorative triglyph (three stiff virgins?) at the end of a beam. The  "marriageable nymph[s]" do seem to approach art as decoration or fashion, knick-knacks for their future homes in "Cincingondolanati":  viz. the mention of the tourist-trade glassworks at Murano, and this prattle: "look / girls in the style of that's the / foliage what is it didn't Ruskin / says about you got the haven't Marjorie / isn't this well-curb simply darling" (255). On the other hand, what is a metope if not decoration on a building?

By once again referring to Browning at the end of the poem, Cummings conflates a reverence for past culture (Shelley) with nostalgia for one's homeland. In Browning's "Memorabilia," the unnamed person who once "saw Shelley plain" is moved to laughter at Browning's reverence for such casual contact with the great. Browning's poem ends with an account of the speaker finding a moulted eagle feather on the moor and then saying (perhaps self-deprecatingly or sheepishly), "Well, I forget the rest." As if to say that carrying on Shelley's spirit (the feather) is more important than waxing nostalgic over past greatness? And / or that one can emotionalize too much about items of "memorabilia" (the feather again)? Clearly, the "dollarbringing virgins" are nostalgic for a past that they experience incompletely, much as Browning lacked real experience of Shelley. Perhaps Cummings is saying that the virginal metopes have been penetrated only by useless half-baked knowledge (represented by the upright triglyphs, i. e., "Education," "thos. cook & son"), thus missing real experience and lacking ability to express what knowledge they do have.

256. "a man who had fallen among thieves" [ONE-XXVII] (SP 130-131)
Refers to the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-42). [leal = "loyal"] Lou Rus (letter, July 22, 1998) suggests we read this poem in the light of a passage from Henry David Thoreau that occurs towards the end of the first chapter of Walden ("Economy"): "I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself."--a statement often quoted with approval by EEC. Cummings usually quotes this passage to Ezra Pound when EP is ranting about the necessity of knowing economics and changing the world (cf. Pound / Cummings 140-143; 145; 364-365 and Selected Letters 243). In a similar vein, Ann R. Morris has suggested that the subject of the poem "is not man's social responsibility but rather every man's potential divinity" (39). Other poems describing homeless people in various states of inebriation are: "a)glazed mind layed in a / urinal" (CP 388), "grEEn's d" (CP 534), "a gr // eyhaie" (CP 705), and "s.t:irst;hiso,nce;ma:n" (CP 710). This list is by no means exhaustive. EEC also wrote at least two poems about panhandlers: "but mr can you maybe listen there's" (CP 314) and "'right here the other night something / odd" (CP 800).

259. "poets yeggs and thirsties" [ONE-XXXI]
yegg = a beggar, lowlife ne'er-do-well, a thief.
See Robert Wegner's "Where are the Yeggs of Yesteryear?" in Spring 5 (1996): 55-58.

262. "voices to voices,lip to lip"
each dream nascitur,is not made = "each dream is born,is not made." nascitur = "to be born; to rise, begin, originate, be produced, spring forth, proceed, grow, be found" [Latin]. cf. 232. [ONE-V] "yonder deadfromtheneckup graduate of a" and Him III.vi (132 / 126).

265. "the season 'tis,my lovely lambs," [TWO-I]
Sumner may refer to William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), Yale Professor, Social Darwinist and advocate of economic liberalism. More likely, Cummings refers to John S. Sumner, "executive secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice" (Daniels 81). In 1922, fearing seizure and prosecution by Sumner, the publisher Horace Liveright had several phrases and words cut from Cummings' war memoir The Enormous Room without the poet's approval (see Gerber 178-179). Sumner is satirized in Act II of Cummings' play Him as "John Rutter, President pro tem. of the Society for the Contraception of Vice" (54).

The Volstead Act was passed to enforce the 18th Amendment of the Constitution, the famous Prohibition of alcoholic beverages. The Act went "into effect on January 16, 1920" (Kennedy, Dreams 211).

Mann's righteousness "U. S. Rep. J. R. Mann gave his name to the White Slavery Act of 1910, popularly known as the Mann Act. It decreed fines and imprisonment for persons transporting 'any woman or girl' across state lines for the purpose of prostitution or 'any other immoral purpose.' Young men at Harvard, which Cummings entered in 1911, saw this law as an impediment to extracurricular romance" (Gerber 177-178).

the Honourable Mr.(guess), probably Charles R. Forbes, one-time deserter and head of the Veterans' Bureau under President Harding. Forbes was in charge of the "Government's work for those disabled war heroes in whose behalf every public man considered it his duty to shed a public tear. Forbes held office for less than two years, and during that time it was estimated that over two hundred million dollars went astray in graft and flagrant waste on the part of his Bureau" (Allen 124). Forbes was sent to Leavenworth Prison in 1926, the same year which saw the publication of this poem in Is 5.

267. "next to of course god america i"
oh / say can you see by the dawn's early = the first words to the U.S. national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner.
land of the pilgrims' . . . my / country 'tis of = quotations from the patriotic song "My Country 'Tis of Thee," lyrics by Samuel Francis Smith (1808-1895): 

272. "come,gaze with me upon this dome" [TWO-VIII]
this dome / of many coloured glass —Cummings wrote to D. Jon Grossman that this line is taken from Shelley's Adonais, stanza 52, line 3. The first part of the stanza reads:

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

305. "along the brittle treacherous bright streets" [FIVE-III] (SP 66)
"Ici?" French--"Here?"—"Ah, no, my dear, it's too cold."
chevaux de bois = "wooden horses."

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311. [I] ",mean-"
Robert Beloof and Barry Marks see this poem as portraying "the experiences during one evening and one morning of children and adults who live in an apartment hotel [a pension]" (Marks 49). The reader should look within the text for the fragmented words "humanity" and "putrescence." The word credo is better read as an English noun than as a Latin verb. The phrase fais do do is French baby-talk for "go to sleep." Perhaps also fais do can be taken to mean to "make dough" or "make money" (Marks 51).

312. [II] "oil tel duh woil doi sez"
An American soldier in a French bar, sometime after World War I. For an excellent exposition and interpretation, see Larry Chott, "The Sight of Sound: Cummings' 'oil tel duh woil doi sez'," Spring 6 (1997): 45-48.

317. [VII] "Space being(don't forget to remember)Curved" (SP 159-160)
Among other topics, the speaker of this poem discusses the curvature of space, one aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity. See Richard B. Vowles, "Cummings' 'Space being . . . Curved'." Explicator 9.1 (1950), item 3. At the end of The Explicator 9.5 (March, 1951), after item 37, the editors print this interesting response from Cummings:

Dear Sir--

 please let your readers know that the author of
 "Space being(don't forget to remember)Curved"
 considers it a parody-portrait of one scienceworshipping
 supersubmoron in the very act of reading(with
 difficulties)aloud,to another sw ssm,some wouldbe
 explication of A.Stone&Co's unpoem

                                                                      E. E. Cummings
December 11 1950

earth's most terrific / quadruped = the elephant, Cummings' favorite animal, his "totem." See the cover of Spring 4 for a characteristic Cummings sketch of an elephant. Also reproduced on the Cummings Images page.
For on-line criticism of this poem see "On 'Space being(don't forget to remember)Curved'" at the MAPS site.

319. [IX] "y is a WELL KNOWN ATHLETE'S BRIDE"
The protagonists of this poem, y and z, (the "2 boston / Dolls") are Josephine Rotch (Mrs. Albert Bigelow) and Harry Crosby, a minor poet and patron of the arts who spent much of the 20s in Paris. On December 10, 1929, after meeting Mrs. Bigelow at the New York apartment of a friend, Crosby shot her and then himself. See Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun (New York: Random House, 1976). William Carlos Williams also wrote a poem, "The Death of See," about this sensational murder-suicide (see Collected Poems Vol I, 416-417). Link: "Harry Crosby" page at the MAPS site, including "A Biographical Essay"
hoe tell days are // teased = the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street, site of the murder-suicide.

322. [XII] "poor But TerFLY"
This poem presents a satiric, fictionalized account of the career of EEC's first wife Elaine Orr (also from Troy, New York), leaving out her involvement with the poet. (See Kidder, Introduction 88-89).

poor But TerFLY = popular song, with music by Raymond Hubbell and lyrics by John Golden. The song was first performed on Broadway in the musical revue The Big Show, August 31, 1916. William Slater Brown (who is "B" in The Enormous Room) remembered meeting Cummings in 1917 on a boat to France where both were going to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps: "Cummings found a piano somewhere and sat down and played "Poor Butterfly" with all sorts of trills in a rather satiric way" (quoted in Collier 128). This song seems to have been a staple of Cummings' repertoire in those years. Richard S. Kennedy reports on a late night outing in 1916: "At one point, [S. Foster] Damon went to the piano and rolled out a polonaise and Cummings followed the act with "Poor Butterfly" (Dreams 89). The lyrics of the song tell of a Japanese woman (the "Butterfly") who learns from a visiting sailor to "how to love in the 'Merican way." The sailor leaves her, but she waits faithfully for him, for "once Butterfly gives her heart away, / She can never love again; she is his for aye." To view a reproduction of the sheet music and complete lyrics of "Poor Butterfly," click on the image above.

(flesh is grass) = Isaiah 40:6: "All flesh is grass / and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. / The grass withers, the flower fades, / when the breath of the Lord blows upon it."

the way of(all / flesh is grass) refers to satirical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) by Samuel Butler. See 390. [7] "sonnet entitled how to run the world)" (SP 104).

eloping to Ire(land = EEC's first wife Elaine, who announced that she wanted a divorce after meeting the Irishman Frank MacDermot on board ship to France. See Kennedy, Dreams 249-265.

grass widow / er A "grass widow" is a woman who is divorced or separated from her husband, or a woman whose husband is temporarily absent. The phrase was also used for the mother of an illegitimate child. In its earliest sense of "unwed mother," the phrase may allude to the site of illicit liaisons: a bed of straw or grass. 

my // MotH . . . (Er / camef / romth / AIR —The end of the poem quotes from another popular song of 1916, "Ireland Must Be Heaven, for My Mother Came from There" (Fred Fisher, music; Joe McCarthy, Howard Johnson, lyrics). Some of the lyrics (as sung in this excerpt from besmark.com  ) are as follows:

Ireland must be Heaven,
For an angel came from there,
I never knew a living soul
One half as sweet or fair,

For her eyes are like the starlight,
And the white clouds match her hair,
Sure Ireland must be Heaven,
For my mother came from there.

Injustice Taughed = Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and former President William Howard Taft, appointed to the court in 1921 by Warren G. Harding.
Wouldwoe = President Woodrow Wilson.
Lydia E. McKinley = conflation of Lydia E. Pinkham, marketer of patent medicine for women and President William McKinley.
Buch = James Buchanan, President who preceded Abraham Lincoln.
C.O.D. abbreviation for "cash on delivery" or "collect on delivery." Formerly, the term "cod" meant "bag," and by extension, "scrotum" (cf. "codpiece"). It is also British schoolboy slang for "joke."
inley = "in [Robert E.] Lee."
Clever Rusefelt = conflation of Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Odysseus Graren't = "Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant are not Odysseus."
he ant = "he is an ant" or "he ain't" --has no rights, is not considered human.
Sitting Bull's T.P. = "teepee and toilet paper" (Read 32).
duckbilled platitude refers to the duckbilled platypus, a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal.
Lays aytash unee = "les États-Unis" [French] or the United States. As Read points out, "lays" no doubt has a sexual connotation here. Perhaps unee = "un-E. E.," or "not E. E. Cummings"?

325. [XVI] "tell me not how electricity or"
ludendorff = Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937), German general in World War I, later a Nazi party member and fervent anti-communist. In 1925, he was dumped by Hitler as candidate for President in favor of an even more illustrious general, Paul von Hindenburg.  See also http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWludendorff.htm.
Krassin probably refers to Leonid Borisovich Krassin (spelled also Krasin, 1870-1926), early Bolshevik, revolutionist, bomb-maker, counterfeiter, engineer, and later diplomat for the nascent USSR. His wife published his papers posthumously in English as Leonid Krassin, His Life and Work (London, 1929). See Timothy Edward O'Connor, The Engineer of Revolution: L. B. Krasin and the Bolsheviks, 1870-1926 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). Both Krassin and Ludendorff were sidelined by their respective parties, but perhaps the bomb-maker is seen more sympathetically here than the general. 

327. [XVII] "FULL SPEED ASTERN)"
m // usil(age)ini = Mussolini + musilage [a kind of glue] + age.
hutchinson says = Whoever he is, Hutchinson is quoting some additional lyrics to Cole Porter's 1928 hit tune, "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)":

Sloths who hang down from the twigs do it
Though the effort is great
Sweet guinea pigs do it
Buy a couple and wait

332. [XXII] "Lord John Unalive(having a fortune of fifteengrand"
Lord John Unalive remains (as yet) unidentified. Any suggestions?
keltyer = "culture."

334. [XXIV] "from the cognoscenti"
In an unpublished letter to Norman Friedman, dated "June 25 1955," Cummings notes that the last two words of the poem are an anagram for "charles darwin." Combining the first and last lines forms the statement "from the cognoscenti of charles darwin," thus making the poem some sort of comment on evolution. What sort of comment is up to the reader to decide.
cognoscenti = "those in the know" [Italian].
pseudo . . . podia = a type of amoeba. Literally, "fake foot" [Greek].
radarw leschin = anagram for "charles darwin."

335. [XXV] "murderfully in midmost o.c.an"
See Wegner 13-14 and Kidder, Introduction 91-92. EEC skewers the mystery writer S. S. Van Dine, who, under his real name, Willard Huntington Wright, had written Modern Painting (1915), a book much-cherished and well-annotated by the young Cummings. Van Dine's sleuth was named Philo Vance, hence philophilic, or "Philo-loving." Kidder points out that EEC "must have been offended by the fall of an idol" (92). For Wright's influence on EEC, consult Kennedy, Dreams 80; 94-95 and Cohen, PoetandPainter 120-122.

336. [XXVI] "ohld song"
In an unpublished letter to Norman Friedman, dated "June 25 1955," Cummings says the poem presents "the 'problem of' human 'identity' via one housefly. Compare Him Act I Scene 4(mirror speech)."

337. [XXVII] "the first president to be loved by his"
them Yapanese Craps-- On his way back from a trip to Alaska, President Warren G. Harding fell ill "from eating crab meat on the presidential boat" (Allen 112). Further stricken at San Francisco, the president "died suddenly--on August 2, 1923--of what his physicians took to be a stroke of apoplexy" (Allen 111). After Harding's death, numerous members of his administration were revealed to have engaged in graft and corruption. (see notes for 265 "the season 'tis,my lovely lambs,"). Knowledge of these impending scandals probably hastened the president's death. A journalist later quoted Harding as having said, "My God this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies. . . . But my damn friends, my God-damned friends . . . they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights" (quoted in Daniels 102).

Cummings' criticism of presidential solecism was not limited to Harding. In 1927, EEC told a man on the street interviewer from the New York Daily News that "The most wonderful thing that President Coolidge did was to confuse the whole country about the true meaning of a simple English sentence. 'I do not choose to run' sounds simple, but nobody in the country except the President knows what it means" (quoted in Norman 230).

346. [XXXVI] "sunset)edges become swiftly"
inverno = "winter" [Italian]. The word may also suggest inferno, "hell" or "fire."

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383. [2] "moon over gai"
gai = Ge = “Earth” [Greek]. See Him, Act III., scene 5 (129 / 123): Gay may change = “Ge (Earth) may change” [Greek].
gai / té = "gaieté" or "gaîté," French for frivolity or gaiety. The poem depicts the moon rising over the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse. The Rue de la Gaîté runs just to the west of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, between the Avenue du Maine and the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. (Possibly also the name of an outdoor circus-variety show in Paris?)
the moon over death over edgar = the moon over the cemetery and the Boulevard Edgar Quinet. To the east, at denfert, or the Place Denfert-Rochereau, is an entrance to the catacombs, where the bones of millions of dead Parisians were relocated when the cemeteries became too crowded.

387. [4] "i / (meet)t(touch)"
The "jeff dick / son" mentioned at the end of this poem was a boxing promoter in Paris. Unscrambled, the last lines read "jeff dickson fecit mcmxxxii" or "Jeff Dickson made [promoted this fight in] 1932." See Kidder, Introduction 107.

388. [5] "a)glazed mind layed in a / urinal"
Notice the parentheses around the first and last letters of the poem.
stetti = "steady."

390. [7] "sonnet entitled how to run the world)" (SP 104)
Here is Cummings' "paraphrase" of lines 6-8:

G . . . never be guilty of self-pity;if you once had a little but now have least,forget the earlier time gladly;& when you have least,remember gladly the time when you had most
H . . . treat your true(highest)self as something sacred--never flaunt it in public,like a flag,for everyone to see (Letters 271).

lines 9 10 11 say that the subject of the sonnet's 2nd part is not "flesh is grass"(i.e. living is dying)as the Bible tells you, but dying is living("grass is flesh") (Letters 271).

392. [9] "o pr"
unde negant redire quemquam = "whence, they say, no one returns" [Latin]. Catullus, poem 3, in which the poet mourns the death of his mistress' pet sparrow, who has gone to the underworld, never to return. Sheridan Baker notes that the missing "o" refers not only the baseball but also very probably to "the little white ball that used to bounce along from word to word of the songs flashed-on at the lower edge of moving picture screens, a line at a time, marking the beat for the audience to join in the chorus" (232). See Sheridan Baker, "Cummings and Catullus" Modern Language Notes 74 (1959): 231-234. See also Richard D. Cureton, "Visual Form in E. E. Cummings' No Thanks," Word & Image 2 (1986): 245-77 and Cummings, six 50.

394. [11] "ci-gît 1 Foetus(unborn to not die"
ci-gît = "here lies" [French].

395. [12] "why why"
In an unpublished letter to Norman Friedman, dated "June 25 1955," Cummings writes:

    this poem says(if I remember my zoology)that nothing is more,or less,significant than if I pick up the You of an angleworm from the ground where he-she squirms(instead of e.g. stepping on him). Vide dictionary "metameric","homonomous","heteronomous"

398. [15] "one nonsufficiently inunderstood"
Norman Friedman translates the last lines as "I want to say right here and now that my jack [money] rides with you—Very Sincerely, I" (Art 77).

401. [18] "this little / pair"
This poem is a modern Mother Goose rhyme, complete with magical transformations. It parodies two nursery rhymes:

a)        There was a little man,
     Who wooed a little maid,
And he said, "Little maid, will you wed, wed, wed?
     I have little more to say,
     So will you, yea or nay,
For least said is soonest mended, -ded, -ded, -ded."

     The little maid replied,
     "Should I be your little bride,
Pray what must we have for to eat, eat, eat?
     Will the flame that you're so rich in
     Light a fire in the kitchen?
Or the little god of love turn the spit, spit, spit?"

b) Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

403. [20] "go(perpe)go"
Norman Friedman, Nat Henry, and Rushworth M. Kidder have all pointed out that this poem parodies Proverbs 6: 6, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise." See Friedman Art 117-121, Kidder, Introduction 110 and Nat Henry, The Explicator 20 (1963), item 63. The reader might also note the incremental build-up of the phrase from Proverbs and the bi-lateral symmetries in the letters and spacings of many individual lines. These symmetries are least partially explained by the root meanings of the words "sinister dexterity," which both stem from Latin and mean, respectively, "left" and "right."

    To be sure, Billy’s action was a terrible breach of naval decorum. But in that decorum he had never been instructed; in consideration of which the lieutenant would hardly have been so energetic in reproof were it not for the concluding farewell to the ship. This he rather took as meant to convey a covert sally on the new recruit’s part, a sly slur at impressment in general, and that of himself in especial. And yet, more likely, if satire it was in effect, it was hardly so by intention, for Billy, though happily endowed with a gaiety of high health, youth, and a free heart, was yet by no means of a satirical turn. The will to it and the sinister dexterity were alike wanting. To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to him. 

409. [26] "what does little Ernest croon" (SP 154; see also Kennedy's note, SP 137-138).
The poem satirizes Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932) by parodying lines from two Victorian poets. The first line, what does little Ernest croon, is a send-up of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Cradle Song": "What does little birdie say / In her nest at peep of day?" Line three, (kow dow r 2 bul retoinis, echoes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Psalm of Life":

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not the goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

410. [27] "little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where" (SP 57).
Joe Gould was a Harvard graduate who hung out on the streets of Greewich Village, depending on handouts for sustenance. Though he was supposedly writing / compiling An Oral History of Our Time, Gould was actually "doing nothing of the kind, but cadging drinks" (Kidder 112). Joseph Mitchell's book Joe Gould's Secret explores Gould's life. Kidder says that the line "a myth is as good as a smile" indicates that Cummings may have guessed at Gould's secret. However, The Village Voice recently re-discovered eleven of Gould's notebooks in the archives at NYU. (For more on Gould, see Kennedy 269 and Norman 133-138, 174-175.) Recently a movie has been made based on Mitchell's book. Here's a another review of the film that quotes the EEC poem "no time ago" (CP 648)--also about Gould (warning: loads slowly).

413.[30]  "kumrads die because they’re told)" (SP )
kumrads = "comrades," or communists.

414. [31] "does yesterday's perfection seem not quite"
The capital letters in the last line spell "IS," a key Cummings term. In his essay on Gaston Lachaise, Cummings writes, "to appreciate child art we are compelled to undress one by one the soggy nouns whose agglomeration constitutes the mechanism of normality, and finally to liberate the actual crisp organic squirm--the IS" (Miscellany 19). For an interpretation of this poem, see Kidder 113-114.

415. [32] "numb(and"
A very obscure poem that depicts how snow and ice cling, hang, and droop from a large iron structure (possibly the Eiffel tower). The snow and ice look like "w / ar / pin / g dre // ams whichful sarcasms / papery deathfuls"—but under its winter coating this structure is an "alive secretly i" that "awaits / yes" (spring). Cummings' consistent satire of the pomposity of public statues (CP 408 and CP 636) makes unlikely Kidder's suggestion that the poem describes snow sliding off the statue "of a nineteenth century industrialist . . . in Washington Square Park" (112).

423. [40] "as if as"
This poem depicts how the rising sun gradually reveals the world. 

425. [42] "out of a supermetamathical subpreincestures" croons canned / à la vallee refers to Rudy Vallee, the most popular pre-Bing Crosby crooner.  preserved goldfishian gestures in films produced by Samuel Goldwyn (originally Goldfish), head of MGM Studios.  sally rand = fan-dancer of the 30s, whose motto was "the fan is quicker than the eye" (Daniels 244). Photo:  Sally Rand and her feathered fans (from Daniels fig. 21).  fand = hand, rand, fan. No doubt the word "fly" has multiple meanings also. 425 [42] χαίρετε = "chairete" = "rejoice!" or "greetings" in Greek [pronounced "ki - ray - tay"— Cummings rhymes it with “entirety.”]. Root-word for English "charity." A variation of this word is the title for Cummings' 1950 book of poems, XAIPE. recent world's fair celebrating "A Century of Progress" in Chicago in 1933. b.o.fully speaking "b.o." = "body odor" and/or “box office.”

430. [47] "ondumonde'"
In his book Americans in Paris (1969), George Wickes writes: "The subject of this poem is a Negro [bantamweight] boxer named Panama Al Brown who was a familiar figure in the Paris ring between 1926 and 1938" (117). Wickes continues: "The most astonishing part of Al Brown's career came years later when he lost his title, and Cocteau--of all people--managed his comeback campaign. 'Al Brown was a poem in black ink,' wrote Cocteau, unwittingly describing the poem Cummings had written. The composition not only outlines the boxer in action but reports the whole scene through scraps of conversation and incidental details" (117-118). According to Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir, Brown was managed in Paris by the promoter Jeff Dickson, who is mentioned in "i / (meet)t(touch)" (CP 387). Brown was known for his "grace of movement" in the ring, and after his brief Cocteau-inspired comeback in 1938, he was featured at the Cirque Médrano "in a shadow-boxing dance act to a jazz accompaniement" (Steegmuller 433). Stovall offers a brief account of Al Brown's life in Paris on pp. 67-68 of Paris Noir. Links: Panama Al Brown's  record and a brief biography (with photo).

ondumonde" = "[champi]on du monde" = "champion of the world" [French].
"(first than carefully poised now then why sprig slinkily strolling (precisely) dynamite yearns swoons & is dense killing whip alert floats corruptingly)"
ça y est = "that's it" [French].
qu'est-ce que tu veux = "what do you want" [French].
il est trop fort le nègre = "he's too strong, the Negro" [French]. 5, 7, 8,
"dropped writhes nothingish sprawl, TO 9 & (musically-who? // pivoting) / SmileS"
c'est fini . . . allons "it's over . . . let's go" [French].
"ahlbrhoon = "Al Brown"

431. [48] "floatfloafloflf"
A poem about the dancer Paul Draper. See Richard Crowder, The Explicator 16 (1958), item 41. A misprint appears in the newest Complete Poems (1994):  line 11 should read “irlErec” instead of “irlEric”.  Both the typescript edition of No Thanks and the HBJ Complete Poems of 1980 read “irlErec”. (Cummings is writing the word “Erec / , / t,” not the name “Eric.”) Photo, short biography of Paul Draper.

cupidoergosum = "cupido ergo sum" = "I desire therefore I am" [Latin]. See 494. [8] "the Noster was a ship of swank"
omiepsicronlonO-- / megaeta? = scrambled Greek letters: omicron [O, o], epsilon [E, e], omega [W, w], eta [H, h]. In Greek, these four letters represent the vowels O and E, two long (omega and eta) and two short (omicron and epsilon). 

438 [51] "Jehovah buried,Satan dead,"
a Five Year Plan = The Soviet Union began implementing economic five year plans in 1928.
to kiss the mike . . .  “kiss the microphone (or Irishman) if Jews become objects of / creations of prejudice.”
Cummings wrote: “argument:man fancies himself god but has become base;what's needed is a(god who dares to be a)man” Houghton Library, Harvard University, call number bMS Am 1823.5 (165).

440. [56] "this mind made war"
This poem is most likely a portrait of Ezra Pound. After receiving a copy of No Thanks, Pound wrote to Cummings: "damn it all, 56 worth more than the prix nobel, from 17 non conformist parsons" (P/C 65). (The "parsons" refer to the Swedish Nobel Committee.) The next line of the letter tells Cummings not to talk about Pound valuing the poem higher than the prize, since Pound's daughter might have need of any future Nobel money for schooling. 

444. [59] "sh estiffl"
In the latest Complete Poems, line 15 is out of place and should be moved flush left with the other lines. The line should also have three question marks, thus:

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464. [2] "kind)"
YM&WC conflates YMCA, YWCA and W.C., "water-closet" or toilet [chiefly British].

professor . . . shapley = Harlow Shapley, celebrated Harvard astronomer who actually compared the universe to neither a biscuit nor a cookie, but to a watch. In his popular science text The Universe of Stars (1929), Shapley wrote, "the whole [Milky Way] is disk-shaped like a watch" (168). Manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard University [bMS Am 1892.7 (108), folder 4] indicate that Cummings read Shapley and knew of the watch comparison, so the distortion here is deliberate ridicule. See also Paul O. Williams, "Cummings' 'kind)'," Explicator 23 (1964) item 4 and Guy Rotella, "Cummings' 'kind)' and Whitman's Astronomer," Concerning Poetry 18 (1985): 39-46.

466. [4] "(of Ever-Ever Land i speak" (SP 149)
Barry Marks writes that the last two lines of the poem are a pastiche of a saying from Rudyard Kipling: "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke" (57).

471. [9] "so little he is"
A poem about Jimmy Savo (1896-1960), vaudeville entertainer "whose fluttering hands strewed the stage with bits of paper in gestures extremely birdlike" (Norman 146). John T. Ordeman's "Two Portraits by E. E. Cummings: Jimmy Savo in Poem and Painting," Spring 6 (1997): 49-54, unearths more information about Savo and reproduces an EEC oil painting of the comic actor. Lloyd Frankenberg's comments on this poem are quite perceptive: "The interrelationships are so deftly numerous that only a few can be pointed out. 'So' begins and concludes the poem. The latter 'so' encloses 'AV' (a root form for 'bird'), thus confirming in Savo's name the bird-like quality expressed in the poem. Savo's 'pert' expertness consists in expanding littleness, but not by blowing up its dimensions. He grOws in a series of circular elations, as the miracle ('L . . . O') of a 'wi?ng' causes a bird to grow through space. They grow by what their motion encloses. Savo is a 'childlost'; yet like a poet recovers original impulses of living: the child, lost to most of us, is found in poet and clown. 'AV' may also allude to another of Savo's expansions, when he suddenly releases a torrent of song in 'River, Stay Away from My Door.' The trailing punctuation at the end recalls the floating particles of paper Savo can incredibly cause to flutter off from his fingers, with infinite lassitude. And of course Savo began as a juggler; a precisionist at balance" (157-58). 

472. [10] "nor woman"
Nat Henry suggests that the poem depicts "the body of a young girl violated and left dead in a park." See Henry's "Cummings' 303 (nor woman)," The Explicator 22 (1963), item #2. Rushworth Kidder offers a less lurid interpretation: "the 'he' is a bum and the propped-up bundle is his drunken companion" (Introduction 129). However, it is more likely that this is simply a poem about a homeless man who died in the snow and cold. He himself is the "bundle." Note the subject of the next poem, "my speciality is living said" (CP 473).

474. [12] "The Mind's("
The poem depicts a Hollywood sound-stage. (Cummings visited Hollywood in 1935.) See Kennedy, Dreams 363-369 and Kidder, Introduction 129.

484. [22] "you shall above all things be glad and young."
that you should ever think —Kidder says this line echoes Peter Quince's confused recitation of the Prologue in the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: "That you should think, / we come not to offend / But with goodwill" (V, i, 109-110).
that way knowledge lies —echoes King Lear's "that way madness lies" (Lear III, iv, 21; Kidder 131-132).

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490. [4] "nobody loved this"
A poem about the Cyclops. See Homer's Odyssey, book nine.

492. [6] "flotsam and jetsam" (SP 154)
(neck and senecktie refers to Horace, Odes, II.14:

Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,
labuntur anni nec pietas moram
rugis et instanti senectae
adferet indomitaeque morti:

494. [8] "the Noster was a ship of swank" (SP 110; see Kennedy's note SP 108)
See Luther S. Luedtke, "Cummings' 'the Noster was a ship of swank'." The Explicator 26 (1968), item #59.

Noster = "Our" [Latin].
mine = besides an explosive device, the possessive pronoun; also, "mind."
Sum = "I am" [Latin]; also, "some" and "sum," the result of mathematical calculations.
Ergo = "Therefore" (as in philosopher René Descartes' famous maxim, "Cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am").
Pater = "Father" (i.e., God the Father). Pater may also refer to English aesthete Walter Pater (1839-1894). In addition, "when joined to Noster [Pater] becomes Pater Noster, not only 'our [Walter] Pater,' 'our [literary] Father,' but also the Lord's Prayer" (Luedtke).

497. [11] "red-rag and pink-flag "
red-rag and pink-flag = Communists.
blackshirt and brown = Fascists.
Norman Friedman (Art 81) points out that each stanza of the poem parodies a different nursery rhyme:
Stanza 1:

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags,
And some in tags,
And one in a velvet gown!

Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.

Some like it hot,
Some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old.

Possibly this song was influenced by Shakespeare’s

In 1967, George Lucas, who was to become the creator of Star Wars, made a short (6 minute) film visualization of this poem. For some stills from the film and a short clip, see "anyone lived in a pretty (how) town" (University of Southern California).
On-line criticism of "anyone" (MAPS site)

531. [43] "hate blows a bubble of despair into" (SP 70)
The second stanza was probably influenced by these lines from Emerson's "The Sphinx":

Eterne alternation
  Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,--
  Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre

536. [48] "mortals)"
Cummings wrote of the acrobats depicted in this poem that they are "transformed from "mortals' to 'im'mortals because they risked their lives to create something beautiful. Finally they disappear into the place from which they appeared;just as the last syllable '(im' of the my poem goes back to the first word 'mortals)'" (Letters 259; see also Letters 221).

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543. [III] "it's over a(see just" (SP 118-119)
Compare and contrast with the Adam and Eve story. Why do you suppose the poet chose "gravensteins" as the apple variety rather than, say, "red delicious"?

544. "of all the blessings which to man"
its hoi in its polloi "hoi polloi" = "the people" or "the inhabitants of the polis [city-state]" [Greek]. The basic meaning here appears to be that the individual, represented by the definite article hoi, disappears into the masses (polloi). The reference is somewhat complex, however, since the Greeks contrasted the people of the polis, hoi polloi, with the barbarians, hoi barbaroi. So in that sense hoi polloi may mean all the members of the political ethnocentric in-crowd. As a further irony, we might note that in Greek the definite article is forced to be plural because it modifies polloi. The hoi can only "preexist" within its own multiplicity (polloi).

551. [XI] "mr u will not be missed"
mr u = Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977). Charles Norman quotes a contributor's note from Secession 2 (July, 1922):  "E. E. Cummings. Candidate for the mayoralty of Paris, the present literary capital of America. Indorses Secession campaign against Louis Untermeyer, an anthologist best known for the omission of William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore from his Modern American Poetry." Norman notes that Untermeyer's third edition (1925) did include poems by Williams, Moore, and Cummings (179). According to Kennedy, Jean Starr Untermeyer "was more amused than offended by Cummings' little rhyme about her husband" (Dreams 405).
    In his article "missing mr u (not)" [Spring 10], Philip Gerber notes that the basis for Cummings' comic poem was probably the song of the Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado:

Ko-Ko:  As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
               I've got a little list?I've got a little list
                Of society offenders who might well be underground,
                    And who never would be missed?who never would be missed!
                There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs?
                All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs—
                They'd none of ‘em be missed—they'd none of 'em be missed!

Here the cast joins in with its refrain of general commendation:

Chorus:  He's got 'em on the list—he's got 'em on the list;
              And they'll none of 'em be missed—they'd none of 'em be missed!

Ko-Ko's "little list" is a lengthy one. It continues:

Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And "who doesn't think she dances, but would rather like to try";
And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist—
I don't think she'd be missed—I'm sure she'd not be missed! (Gilbert, Librettos 10)

To all of which the cast assents. No, they'd not be missed. None of these natural enough targets, those on the remainder of the list, or even those yet to come, none of them would be missed, not even a little bit.
    —And if the lady novelist, why not the great anthologist?  Indeed, why not? ("missing" 44).

552. [XII] "it was a goodly co"
The company in question is the Ex-Lax corporation.

553. [XII] "plato told"
lao tsze = legendary founder of Taoism, a Chinese philosophy.
general . . . sherman = Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), famous for his devastating march to the sea in 1864. At his graduation address at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, he is reported to have said: "War is at best barbarism . . . Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."
nipponized = "japanized" and refers to the sale of scrap metal to Japan before World War II. The el refers to an elevated train or subway line.

554. [XIV] "pity this busy monster,manunkind," (SP 158-159)
The "electrons" are those of an electron microscope, and curving wherewhen probably refers to Einstein's theory of curved space-time. No fewer than three Explicator articles deal with this poem. They are by John Britton 18 (1959) item 5, James W. Gargano 20 (1961) item 21, and Nat Henry 27 (1968) item 68. [See also "Space being(don't forget to remember)Curved" (CP 317; SP 159-160)].

568. [XXVIII] "rain or hail"
sam = Sam Ward, handyman and caretaker of EECs' Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. See Margaret Foerster, "A Note on Cummings and My Family at Silver Lake" Spring 6 (1997): 22-24. Ward's letters to the Cummings family (particularly his use of the lower case "i") may have influenced EEC. Charles Norman quotes EEC: "I remember once he wrote: 'we had a Big snow' . . . He'd write 'i'—not 'I'—because 'I' wasn't important to him. Sam Ward's way is the only way. Instead of being artificial and affected, it's the conventional way that is artificial and affected" (309). Kennedy quotes part of a letter from Sam Ward on page 110 of Dreams in the Mirror.

570. [XXX] "Hello is what a mirror says"
Cummings comments: "true wars are never won;since they are inward, not outward, and necessitate facing oneself" (Letters 247). EEC's other comments (in the same letter) on this poem are equally illuminating. This poem may refer to these lines in Marianne Moore's "In Distrust of Merits":  "There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war, but I would not believe it. / I inwardly did nothing. / O Iscariot-like crime!" (Complete Poems 138). Both poems were written during World War II. According to Firmage (56), Cummings' "Hello is what a mirror says" (CP 570) was first published in Accent 3.4 (Summer 1943), while Marianne Moore’s "In Distrust of Merits" was first published in The Nation 156 (May 1, 1943): 636. 

577. [XXXVII] "we love each other very dearly"
synbeams = a typo for "sunbeams'?

In his "Dante and E. E. Cummings," Allan Metcalf contends that the line "before God wished Himself into a rose" refers to Dante, Paradiso 23.73-74: "Quivi è la rosa in che 'l verbo divino / carne si fece" ("There is the rose [Mary] in which the divine word / became flesh"). Cummings quotes a similar passage (Paradiso 33.7-9) in nonlecture five (97).

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The title: χαίρε = "chaire" = "rejoice!" or "greetings" in Greek [pronounced "chi - ra" with an aspirated "h"]. Root-word for English "charity."

605. [7] "we miss you,jack--tactfully you(with one cocked"
jack = Peter Monro Jack (1896-1944), book reviewer for the New York Times. See Pound / Cummings 160-162.
"fert / ig" = "ready" [German].
wallendas = "The Flying Wallendas," a family of trapeze artists.

606. [8] "o // the round"
the round / little man = Paul Rosenfeld (1890-1946), music and literary critic who wrote several articles on EEC.

611. [13] "chas sing does(who"
Cummings comments: "'chas sing' . . . is the name of a Chinese laundryman on Minetta Lane(maybe Street). This poem tells you that,in spite of his name, he doesn't sing(instead,he smiles always a trifle while ironing nobody knows whose shirt. I can't believe you've never done any ironing:but,if you have,how on earth can you possibly fail to enjoy the very distinct pictures of that remarkable process given to you by the poet's manipulating of those words which occur in the poem's parenthesis?!" (Letters 162). Despite EEC's claims to the contrary, Michael Webster maintains that Mr. Sing does sing, if only silently through his ironing, imitated visually in the poem. See his "'singing is silence': Being and Nothing in the Visual Poetry of E. E. Cummings."

616. [18] "a(ncient)a"
inani = besides its English meaning, the line may refer to the Latin word inani, meaning "empty" or "vain." It's also possible that Cummings, the former classics major, refers here to a famous line in Virgil's Aeneid: "sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani" (I, 464), translated by Robert Fitzgerald as "He broke off [speaking] / To feast his eyes and mind on a mere image" (20). The empty "image" or "pictura" that Aeneas looks at is a Carthaginian painting or bas-relief depicting the fall of Troy. This artwork moves Aeneas to tears and convinces him that the Carthaginians understand the lacrimae rerum, the "tears inherent in things." Perhaps the vain or empty "picture" of a drunk staggering down "conway / 's // unstreet" reminded EEC of the Roman view of the vanity of art? William Levitan, professor of Classics at GVSU, writes, "I think you're right that Cummings is pointing to this line: remember the situation is that Aeneas, invisible at the moment, is in a sense yielding his substance to a visible (but insubstantial) image."

The drunk is visible, but gripped by the invisible Fist of Fate, smiling while Aeneas is crying, old while Aeneas is middle-aged, floating and "weigh / tless" while Aeneas is carrying the weight of the fall of Troy, his ancestral gods, and his mission to found Rome. Both, however, may be said to be "treadwatering." Aeneas is in a new city, on a new street, while the old drunk is in Conway, New Hampshire, a rural place with no art or even what one could call a street. The old man is already an ancestor, an ancient "puppet" in the grip of drink, fate, and old age, while Aeneas is a sort of puppet of the gods and the ancestors, and of the Roman imperium.

635. [37] "F is for foetus(a"
Many have commented that the capital leters in this poem spell "FDR," the initials of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
it's / freedom from freedom / the common man wants —a reference to Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms," first enunciated in the State of the Union address, January 6, 1941. They are: 1) freedom of speech, 2) freedom of worship, 3) freedom from want, and 4) freedom from fear. Norman Rockwell painted a popular series of posters illustrating the freedoms.
honey swoRkey mollypants = "Honi soit qui mal y pense" [French] = "Shame to whomever thinks evil of it." The motto of the order of the Garter, also known as St. George's motto. William Harmon notes that quite a few "writers in the 1930s and 1940s played variations" on this motto. Harmon also thinks he remembers some criticism being leveled at Roosevelt for having one of one of his sons working at the White House during World War II--to which someone responded, "Honi soit qui mal y pense" (71). Can anyone confirm or deny Harmon's memory? See his "Cummings' Caprice in 'F'," Spring 7 (1998): 68-72.

636. [38] "why must itself up every of a park"
generalissimo e = General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

643. [45] "when your honest redskin toma"
Norman Friedman notes that the punctuation marks in this poem are meant to be pronounced out loud (Art 115).

648. "no time ago"
According to Charles Norman, Cummings wrote this poem after a late night walk in Greenwich Village. EEC recalled encountering "a little person who now is dead and who lived by begging." The "person" was Joe Gould (Norman 174-75).

655. [57] "(im)c-a-t(mo)"
Cummings writes that this poem "tells me in its own vivid way that an immobile cat suddenly puts on an acrobatic act:& fall-leaps,becoming drift-whirlfullyfloat-tumblish;& the wanders away,exactly as if nothing had ever happened" (Letters 268). See also Letters, p. 231. Michael Webster's "E. E. Cummings and the Reader:  Technique as Critique" and Milton Cohen's "Disparate Twins: Spontaneity in E. E. Cummings' Poetry and Painting," Spring 4 (1995) both discuss this poem.

656. [58] "after screamgroa"
Cummings notes that this poem is about "a farmer sharpening a bush-scythe on a grindstone" (Letters 232).

"pud-dih-gud" = "pretty good."

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685. [13] "So shy shy shy(and with a"
Allan A. Metcalf makes a persuasive case that this poem was "inspired in important ways" (381) by Dante's sonnet, "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare" (Vita Nuova, chapter 26), a poem which Cummings recited in his third nonlecture. See Metcalf's "Dante and E. E. Cummings."

688. [16] "in time of daffodils(who know"
This poem may have been influenced by Christina Rossetti's "Song":

 When I am dead, my dearest,
   Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
   Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
   With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember;
 And if thou wilt, forget.

 I shall not see the shadows,
   I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
   Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
   That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember;
   And haply may forget.

697. [25] "that melancholy" (SP 133)
"paw?lee" = Polly or Paulie, name of the organ-grinder's cockatoo. See John Logan's "The Organ Grinder and the Cockatoo," Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Jerome Mazzaro (New York: David McKay, 1970), pp. 249-271.

699. [27] "jack's white horse(up"
jack's white horse —Possibly an illuminated advertisement for White Horse Scotch Whisky, visible at the end of West Fourth Street. Or perhaps EEC refers to theWhite Horse Tavern, 567 Hudson Street.
jack may be Peter Monro Jack, a book reviewer, friend of Cummings, and lover of whiskey. He is the subject of the sonnet-elegy "we miss you,jack—tactfully you(with one cocked" (CP 605).

706. [34] "ADHUC SUB JUDICE LIS"
The title quotes line 78 of Horace's Ars Poetica: "Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est" which Kidder translates: "Grammarians dispute, and the case is still before the courts" (Introduction 206).

707. [35] "so you're hunting for ann well i'm looking for will"
Two parents dispute about a couple of wayward teenagers, who may possibly be Ann Hathaway and Will Shakespeare.

725. [53] "n // ot eth"
Note also the arithmetic pattern formed by counting letters and spaces in each line. See John Logan's "The Organ Grinder and the Cockatoo," pp. 268-269.

726. [54] "ardensteil-henarub-izabeth)"
The first word of the poem combines Helena Rubenstein's and Elizabeth Arden’s beauty treatments with hens, henna, rubs and style (Kidder 208).

740. [68] "the(oo)is"
Cummings sees the eyes of a child "who is(reminds me of)myself" (Letters 268). Interested readers should consult Cummings' complete explication of this poem in the Selected Letters.

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790. [18] "nobody could / in superhuman flights"
wut ektyouelly metus = "what actually matters."
The last line can be translated: "if momma hadn't just knocked it endwise."

791. [19] "everybody happy?"
bentham = Jeremy Bentham (1772-1832), Utilitarian philosopher.
1 law for the lions & / oxen is science) = revision of a sentence from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression" (plate 24).

799. [27] "in the heavenly realms of hellas dwelt"
Cummings retells Homer's story of the affair between the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and the god of war, Ares. Aphrodite's husband was Hephaistos, the lame god of fire and the forge. For Homer's version, see the Odyssey, 8.266-369.

816. [44] "Now i lay(with everywhere around)"
EEC refers to the nursery rhyme, "Now I lay me down to sleep; / I pray the Lord my soul to keep, / And if I die before I wake, / I pray the Lord my soul to take."

820. [48] "t,h;r:u;s,h;e:s"
Robert Wegner sees the punctuation marks in the first line as "thrushes on the branch of a tree, clustered perhaps, but at any rate spaced as separate little beings" (Poetry and Prose 44). Martin Heusser adds that the punctuation marks may also represent the "distinctively spotted breast" of the American wood thrush (258-259).

827. [55] "i / never"
This shape-poem depicts not the nest, but the head of a rubythroated hummingbird, seen from above.

833. [61] "one"
Martin Heusser notes that his poem is shaped like one half of a snowflake. See I Am My Writing, pp. 247-248.

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899. "BALLAD OF AN INTELLECTUAL" (SP 155-157; Miscellany 277-279)
This poem parodies the transition that many American intellectuals made from being supporters of the new modernist art in the 20s to being supporters of social revolution and communism in the 30s. Some references:
Jerse = James Joyce, author of Ulysses;
Prused = Marcel Proust, French author of Remembrance of Things Past;
the es of a be = S.O.B.;
Gay Pay Oo = G.P.U., Soviet secret police;
Eddie Gest = Edgar A. Guest, popular poet;
Mike Gold = editor of radical newspaper, The New Masses.

959. "chérie/ the very,picturesque,last Day" (SP 65-6; ETC )
Paolo —an allusion to Dante, Inferno V.74-142. Paolo fell in love with Francesca, his sister-in-law. Both were murdered by Francesca's husband, who caught them in the act.

986. "'out of the pants which cover me"

The first four lines parody the first stanza of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" (1888):

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 A little Porter = recalls T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, lines 196-98:

 But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.   

 the University of Pennsylvania = Ezra Pound's alma mater.
Eheu fugaces Postume —refers to Horace, Odes, II.14:

Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,
labuntur anni nec pietas moram
   rugis et instanti senectae
      adferet indomitaeque morti:

"Ah, Postumus, Postumus, how fleeting / the swift years—prayer cannot delay / the furrows of imminent old-age / nor hold off unconquerable death." (See notes to CP 234 and CP 492.)
what daisy knew = conflates two Henry James titles, Daisy Miller and What Maisie Knew.
all men kill —from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol.

987. "pound pound pound"
This poem refers to or parodies at least four other poems: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" (1842) and "Tears, Idle Tears" (1847), T. S. Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" (1919), and John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819). For another version of stanza one, see Pound / Cummings 329.
pound . . . oh P = the poet Ezra Pound.
grey corona = Pound's typewriter.
Alfred Noise = Alfred Noyes (1880-1958), British poet, author of "Barrel Organ" and "The Highwayman."  Noyes had all but ceased publishing poetry by the time (1952) Cummings wrote this poem.
Speak, speak . . . Perhaps a conflation of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, lines 69-73 and 111-114:

 There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

 'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'     

child of Homer —Pound's father was named Homer. Of course, Cummings also refers to the author of the Odyssey. The opening portion of book 11 of the Odyssey is translated in Pound's Canto I.
The Dial Cantos —According to Nicholas Joost, Pound contributed versions of Cantos 4 (June, 1920), 5, 6, and 7 (August, 1921), 8 (May, 1922), 22 (February, 1928), and part of Canto 27 (January, 1928) to The Dial (Joost 172).
Tears,idle Tears! = a reference to Tennyson's poem, but also to T. S. Eliot, since Cummings was in the habit of calling him "Tears Lyut."
the stiff dishonoured nightingales = parody of the last lines of T. S. Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" (1919):

The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

 fled is that music = part of the last line of John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819):

 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
             Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

• Notes and Links for E. E. Cummings’ Enormous Room [1922]
• An on-line text of The Enormous Room
• Notes for Cummings' Him [1927]
• CIOPW [1931]
• Eimi [1933]
• Tom [1935]
• Santa Claus [1946]
• i: six nonlectures [1953]
• Adventures in Value [1962]
• A Miscellany Revised [1965]
• Fairy Tales [1965]
• A Works Cited List [Bibliography]
• "Cummings' Titles" [from Spring 9]

• List of books
• EEC Bibliography (List of Works Cited)
• Spring home page