i carry your heart Flashcards
Main Speaker
A man talking to his love
Themes
Love desire hope
Imagery
Heart: The poem revolves around the metaphorical concept of carrying someone’s heart within one’s own. This image symbolizes love, intimacy, and emotional connection.
2. Sky: The poet compares his beloved’s eyes to the sky, evoking vastness, depth, and beauty.
3. Sun: The poem mentions the idea of carrying the sun in one’s pocket, which portrays warmth, light, and a sense of brightness and positivity.
4. Moon: Cummings compares his beloved’s smile to the moon, suggesting radiance, gentleness, and perhaps a sense of mystery.
5. Stars: The imagery of stars is used to convey a sense of wonder, beauty, and the idea of something eternal and transcendent.
Language features
Celestial imagery, repetition, enjambment
Tone
affection, intimacy, and deep connection. It conveys a sense of profound love and devotion between the speaker and the person they address in the poem.
Structure
Written in 1st person
Sonnet - Cummings takes the form of the sonnet and reinvents it with his use
of internal rhyme in the first stanza.
Creates his own form and meter & breaks the expected rules of poetry Lack of capitalisation & traditional punctuation
Enjambment, parentheses and lack of punctuation reflect an experimental approach
Context
Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) - deeply religious and highly academic family Harvard graduate interested in pushing boundaries of the written form
Became interested in modernist poetry (Modernists believed in stripping away all that was unnecessary in a poem in order to showcase its form) and began experimenting with form and presentation. From this grew his most distinctive feature: the lack of punctuation and capital letters not just in his poetry, but in his name.
He enjoyed writing poetry about love, nature and God. i carry your heart was published in 1952
Cummings was married twice
