Poetry criticism and literary analysis

Poetry Criticism

Love as a Transforming Force in Cumming's "somewhere I have never traveled"

Cummings's poem cogently depicts the experience of love and union between two people. The text makes use of a particular set of metaphors and specific imagery to deliver its message. The focal point of the poem is thus the metaphor of a flower that successively opens and closes its petals, an image which is reiterated throughout the five stanzas of the text, acquiring thus multiple meanings. The closure-opening imagery describes thus a sort of love mechanism that acts on the self of the poet as a transforming and metamorphosing force, able to modify perpetually the state in which his soul is. This depiction of love is original and significant because it reveals love to be one of the pulsating forces of life,

First of all, love is apt to transform the self and to penetrate into its innermost recesses. The woman lover to whom the poem is addressed as well as love itself are seen as agents or mysterious forces. The first line hints at a displacement of the self through a miraculous, previously unknown experience or sensation: "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience." The idea of a journey into the unknown suggests the overpowering and new sensations brought by the intrusion of love into the poet's life. The next two lines emphasize powerful mastery of love, which is able to 'enclose' or entrap the poet's self: "in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, / or which I cannot touch because they are too near." The verb 'to enclose' suggests the mysterious force of love which makes the poet a prisoner, in spite of the frailty of the woman lover. Here, the closure refers to the sensation of being caught or entrapped into the meshes of love.

Also, love has a life and death power over the self of the poet, as the metaphors of spring and winter imply. A great part of the meaning of the poem rests in the intended oppositions between the frailty of the woman the poet loves and the limitless power she casts over him, with which she can miraculously open and close him, as spring opens and closes its flowers. In the traditional love poetry, the woman is often compared to a rose or another flower, because of her beauty or delicacy. Here, Cummings employs this metaphor to describe his own self, which reacts to every gesture or look from his beloved as the flowers react to the changing seasons: "your slightest look easily will unclose me / though I have closed myself as fingers, / you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens / (touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose." The comparison of love with the spring illustrates the supreme force that the beloved one is endowed with. The relation between spring and the flowers reflects the capacity that love has to unfold the self or to tear it open. The gradual opening that is described here, 'petal by petal' suggests once more the unimaginable and at the same time subtle power of love, which is not only apt to open the self in one simple movement, but to open it as the spring makes a flower bloom and display all its petals one by one. At the same time, love also possesses the opposite power to close the self as a flower, to make it fold back all its petals as if under the influence of a sudden gust of winter: "or if your wish be to close me, I and / my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, / as when the heart of this flower imagines / the snow carefully everywhere descending..." The imagery of these two stanzas has a two-fold meaning. First of all, under the force of love, the self goes forth or withdraws into its own core again. Moreover, the alternating seasons of spring and winter hint to the life and death power that love holds over the poet. The force of love is thus pulsating with the rhythms of life itself.

Through the beauty and intensity of love, one can have a taste of death, intimated by the fragility of the poet's beloved, as well as a taste of immortality or infinite power. As the poet states, love is not comparable with any other power existent in the world: "nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of your intense fragility..." The poet's beloved, although very fragile, is able to compel and to fascinate the beholder: "[fragility] whose texture / compels me with the colour of its countries, / rendering death and forever with each breathing." Thus, love speaks to the person that feels it at once of death as the idea of fragility suggests, and of immortality as the idea of supreme power intimates.