Spring is like a perhaps hand

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form & Meter

As is typical of Cummings’s poetry, “Spring is like a perhaps hand” lacks traditional metrical or formal restraints. The poem’s lines are of variable length and there are no structuring end-rhymes. However, the poem follows a stanzaic pattern that gives it formal unity. In order to communicate the thematic importance of cycles and repetition, Cummings’s poem repeats its own form. First, the poem is organized into a single stanza block of eight lines, concluding with a single-line stanza of only three words. The poem then repeats this structure, albeit with an added line in its second long stanza, without bucking the mirrored form.

Despite eschewing any kind of organizing meter, E.E. Cummings still makes use of meter here and there to achieve a variety of effects. For instance, consider the word “perhaps” (Line 1, 10) and its unorthodox usage. Part of the word’s poetic power comes not only from its grammatical complication, but its metrical status. When the poem’s first line is metrically scanned without “perhaps,” it looks much more traditional: SPRING is LIKE a HAND / which COMES” (Lines 1-2). The opening line becomes trochaic, composed of a meter characterized by a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The addition of the next couple of words in the following line serves to reinforce this meter. While not as common as its mirror image meter, iambic, trochaic is still a common enough meter that a poem structured by it sounds traditional. However, “perhaps” interrupts this meter (“SPRING is LIKE a perHAPS HAND”) with a very rare metrical foot called a bacchius, one unstressed syllable followed by two stressed syllables. This subverts the ear of the reader before the first line has even concluded.

The poem’s use of meter is not limited to its first line. Cummings uses metrical feet all over his poem to create rhythmic sound effects, emphasize meaning, and give his poem aural unity. For example, the first stanza’s “into which people look” (Line 4) helps sustain the line by using back-to-back examples of another highly uncommon meter: cretic. Cretics (also called amphimacers) are three-syllable feet of two stressed syllables with an unstressed syllable in the middle. To make this example more explicit, the phrase looks like: “INto WHICH / PEOple LOOK” (Line 4). Aside from its sound effects, this pairing of cretics mirrors the poem’s larger formal structure of mirroring.

Enjambment

“Spring is like a perhaps hand” widely uses line breaks that interrupt the flow of syntax—that is, enjambment—to create multiple meanings. Enjambment can act as a sort of punctuation, creating phrases and syntactical units that express their own meaning apart from the broader syntax and punctuation of the sentence. Cummings’s poetry is, in part, defined by its consistent use of various poetic techniques: Enjambment, stanza breaks, parentheticals and punctuation, etc. that create smaller units of meaning within larger syntactical systems of meaning. For example, the enjambment of the first line goes far in helping to create the noun phrase reading of “perhaps hand” (Line 1). Additionally, lines like “people stare carefully” (Line 15), “carefully there a strange” (Line 7), or “moving a perhaps” (Line 16), have independent meanings as lineated units of syntax that do not relate to (and often contradict) the meanings the phrases have when placed in the larger context of the sentence spanning multiple lines.

Chiasmus

Repetition is a primary structural component of “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” in terms of the poem’s overarching form, the procession of images, and even sentence-level construction. However, Cummings makes use of more types of repetition than simple mirroring. Chiasmus is a kind of repetition (structural, syntactical, or thematic) that reverses the order of the thing repeated. In other words, elements in chiasmus may be represented as A B B A, with the second pair of elements “flipped” upon its repetition. Consider the following progression: “arranging / a window,into [sic] which people look(while / people stare / arranging and […] placing” (Lines 3-6). Here, the window may be considered element A and the onlookers element B. The crux of the chiastic flip is the word “while” (Line 4), after which the reader first encounters the onlookers the poem just introduced (B) and only then re-encounters the window into which they are staring (A). While the poem often repeats itself without this chiastic flip, Cummings use of chiasmus enforces the thematic and structural importance of both repetition and especially cyclical repetition.