17 pages • 34 minutes read
E. E. Cummings“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Romantic Love
E. E. Cummings’s almost-sonnet “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” is often put on lists of love poems as a clear encapsulation of the emotion inspired by romantic love. To serenade their beloved, the poem’s speaker uses imagery that expands their shared tiny world into the whole of the universe—a heightening of imagery that connotes the speaker’s great, enduring love.
First, the personal ownership of love is registered at the beginning. The possessiveness of the speaker having the beloved’s “heart” (Lines 1-2, 15) is mitigated by the word “carry” (Line 1, 15), which suggests a tender cradling. To enhance this, Cummings locates that cradling “in / my heart)” (Lines 1, 15), creating a sense of intimacy. The sense of deeply held closeness is also enhanced by the sentimental appellations, or apostrophe, the speaker uses: Words such as “my dear” (Line 3), “my darling” (Line 4), “my fate, my sweet” (Line 6), and “my world, my true” (Line 7) all speak to an ongoing, long-term relationship.
The private world implied by the shared pet names is juxtaposed with the epic scale of the speaker’s emotion. The speaker is sure enough in their love to compare its eternity to the workings of celestial objects: “it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you” (Lines 8-9). This declaration makes the poem into the speaker’s grand gesture, which transforms the romantic relationship into a cornerstone of existence on Earth, like the sun and the moon. This widens the poem’s scope, giving weight to the speaker’s feelings for the beloved, which eventually encompasses the universe: The speaker decides that love is so fundamentally the core of everything that it “keep[s] the stars apart” (Line 14), preventing them from crashing into one another and destroying existence as we know it. In other words, the capacity for love holds everything in place.
While the “me” (Line 1) and you in the relationship are important, love thus transcends the individual. The couple’s love becomes universal in its capacity and power. This makes one see the final repeated phrasing, “i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)” (Line 15), as everlasting and explains why it remains an enduring poem of romantic love.
Parental Love
In 1946, Nancy Thayer Roosevelt befriended Cummings, unaware he was her father. This information that had been hidden from her by her mother, Cummings’s first wife, Elaine MacDermot. Cummings had mourned the loss of Nancy for years, as Elaine had cut off all contact in 1924. Upon their reacquaintance, Cummings eventually confessed his paternity. According to biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, after this reveal, Nancy hoped to be an active part of his life, but Cummings remained somewhat distant, in part due to the jealousy of his wife, Marion, and in part because of his own emotional incapacity. Yet, this conflict regarding fatherhood may have inspired “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in],” as the poem deals with love that endures despite separation.
In his journal, Cummings wrote, “[I] am aware that my child's loveliness is like a summer, a season or surface; that while a part of me forever is the tragic & immediate father, wholly I (shall be &)am(& have been always) somebody whose fate is never of this world” (See: Further Reading & Resources). He could not fully let himself connect with Nancy, but at the same time, he felt great regret. After a visit in 1950, Cummings wrote:
It seems to me that [Nancy] is real,& that my life here(with M[arion]isn't. What are all my salutings of Chocorua & worshippings of birds & smellings of flowers & fillings of hummingbirdcups etetc? They're sorry substitutes for human intercourse generally & particularly for spiritual give-&-take with a child or a child-woman whom I adore.
Cummings wrote little about his own process of composition of this poem, so it is unclear if “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” involved these conflicted feelings about his daughter. But the poem was written in the 1950s, shortly after this significant life event. It is possible that the poem offers an apology for not being a present father and/or discusses the “spiritual give-&-take with a child.” It may attempt a reassurance that while Cummings could not be an active father to Nancy, his feelings were intwined with her existence, that it is she who is “whatever a moon has always meant / and whatever a sun will always sing” (Lines 8-9).
Spiritual Love
Cummings’s father was a minister, and because of this, Cummings was well-versed in religious thought. Rushworth Kidder has noted that in Cummings’s last poems, love “has come to be a purified and radiant idea, unentangled with flesh and worlds, the agent of the highest transcendence. It is not far, as poem after poem has hinted, from the Christian conception of love as God” (Kidder, Rushworth M., E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1979, page 235). The sonnet “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in],” written late in life, shows this point, if we substitute Christ or God for the beloved.
The poem holds no specifications regarding the beloved: We are not privy to the beloved’s sex, age, race, or occupation; we do not know what they look like or how they act. Instead, the poem focuses on love as an overpowering, sublime concept. The speaker’s insistence that this is “the deepest secret nobody knows” (Line 10) and the biblical tone of the phrasing of “(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life” (Lines 11-12) may help to indicate that the subject of the poem is not a personal beloved but the love of Christ and/or a divine being. Thus, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in / my heart” (Lines 1-2) may not be a description of earthly love but religious faith.
Read in this way, the dismissal of the solitary “i fear” (Line 5) is an allusion to Psalm 23 from the Bible, which contains the line “I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Faith allows the speaker to “fear / no fate(for you are my fate)i want / no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)” (Lines 6-7)—in this reading, the “you” is a divine presence, making this poem a devotional hymn. Interpreting the poem as a sacred song also adds spiritual meaning to the lines that love and faith are “the deepest secret” (Line 10) that “grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide” (Lines 12-13). The idea of religious transcendence is also shown by the speaker’s observation that love/faith is “the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart” (Line 14).
This reading doesn’t replace a romantic one but may suggest the twinning of love and faith. This may explain why this poem is consistently listed as a choice for a reading at weddings.
Related Titles
By E. E. Cummings
