What is natural or what it means to be? One of our first and earliest instincts is of rhythm, an embryo in its mother’s womb hears and response to the beating of the mother’s heart, the vibration felt when the belly is rubbed. It is the iambic pentameter (is a commonly used type of metrical line in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm that the words establish in that line, which is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet") of language and words. Cummings also uses punctuation and the way words are strung together or dropped off of lines to determine the sound and flow and the rhythm. In reading the Selected Poems of E.E. Cummings I would like to explore two sections, Sweet Spontaneous Earth and Urban Glimpses. The rhythm in these section and use of white space is quite different, yet strong. These sections are not as avant-garde as Poetry of the Eye section, with Cummings play on poetry cubism, (being inspired my Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Declining the Stairs) and he literally deconstruct words, letter by letter and with the help of punctuation turns the written words on the page into visual art. This section is very rhythmic and fragmented in areas like Jazz music, even (in my opinion) giving a shot out the rhythm master himself Edgar Allen Poe;

 (be

     llsbe

            lls)

                 b

                   (be

                        llsbell)

                                   ells

                                        (sbells) pg. 49

Rhythm and music doesn’t seem to be very far away from Cummings and his writings even if the music just happens to be sounds from nature.

With Cummings nature poems, the reader is pulled into a natural world of newness, sex, and the natural world around us. We use all our senses as we travel through Cummings earlier writings of “many moods as well as individual responses to spring, birds, mountains, sunrise and sunsets.” (16) Spring isn’t always sweet and a bed of roses, it is messy and the rhythm is compared to a singer with a “whiskey-voice,” who has “dirty legs and a muddy petticoat, drowsy is your mouth your eyes are sticky with dreams and you have a sloppy body.” Spring is a woman singer worn over by a hard life and a hard winter. Too many nights of feet up in front of the fire and singing into burning logs with melancholy stuck in her throat.  The imagery and rhythm of the words emjamed conveys feeling because that is a trait of Cummings pieces, to warrant a feeling over thinking. Spring is also a poet in section three of Other Seasons, Other Creatures, and unlike in Spring section one where the words are tight and neat on the page with emjambment, three opens to the white space like air;

 the hills

like poets put on

purple thought against

the

magnificent clamor of

                                              day

tortured

in gold, which presently

crumpled

collapses

exhaling a red soul in the dark

A play with consonant sounds still gives an enjambed feel that spreads and look different on the page, there is still a rhythm in the words, that gives an image of a Spring that although beautiful struggles to come in, a pain of birth or leaves under a heavy rain. The personification of Spring in these selection along with the earth and death offers imagery and words that the reader can feel. The earth with its “rhythmic lover” Death only answer is Spring.

In Feeling over thinking with Cummings there is no better place than in his Urban Glimpses here is where I could hear the music, smell the room and no the people... It reminded me so much of and N'tozake Shange or Hughes works and I felt that even though he was talking about waltz I could easily replace it with bumpin and grindin of dancehalls music or rhythm and blues of basement parties, or the despair of the blues in clubs small holes in the walls of the urban cities not the ones in the downtown area. And Cummings play with words strung together feeling like instruments roaring loud on stage, and people with slang dangling from their mouths it is all there in the section Urban Glimpses.

"i was sitting in mcsorley's.      outside it was New York and beauti-

fully snowing.

Inside snug and evil.        the slobbering wallks filthily push witless

creases of screaming warmth chuck pillows are noise funnily swallows

swallowing...."

and it continues on like music and one can feel the room in this winter, can feel the heat and or body heat made by the people, the smoke from cigars or something else, the dim lights it is really exciting. Cummings play with spacing and rhyme to gage speed and/or flow of the poem in this section there is excitement and melancholy as only a urban dive bar can have and the reader feels that. In the sections introduction it writes, “Cummings was experimenting with sound patterns: he complied lists of words that have rhyme and consonance…or words that begin or end with a group of similar sounds….He thought of the work as a sound painting…” (125) Under seven in this section, the musician is there he is playin’ and singin’ and rattles a ghost from “this dingy cage,” the words in this section are fragmented with weird punctuation that interrupts the reading making the words choppy like that of a drum. It is through the instruments, the strummin’ and tappin’, it feels like a Saturday nite, that runs into Sunday morning as this section comes to an end with the images of cathedrals and the sound of bells. The last section nine ends and a line fall off like many of things in the urban center and ends with the “dragging” of “dreams.”

          In both sections Sweet Spontaneous Earth and Urban Glimpses, Cummings give us several examples of “work as a sound painting.” Cummings carefully displays the words in rhythmic order, with the help of alliteration, emjambments, punctuation and personification (for visual and imagery) for poetry that excites all the sense and to bring music in a variety of moods off the page.