Totally Off-Topic: Existentialist Poetry
It’s the birthday of e.e. cummings, which gives me the opportunity to present one of my favorite poems, and offer a short comment on it.
a man who had fallen among thieves
a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat
fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or becauseswaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise
one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly
confessed a button solemnly inert.
Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.
To me, this is a drop-dead gorgeous statement of the central theme of existentialism. We live in an icy universe that is completely devoid of both mercy and meaning, coldly indifferent to our happiness or suffering, and we confer meaning onto it via the decisions we make and the actions we choose to perform. Here, for reasons known only to him, the protagonist defines himself as a Good Samaritan, showing compassion to someone who has done nothing to earn it, bonding himself to a random stranger.
What will you choose today, and how will that serve to define who you are?
Craig you are a person of many surprising interests.
Thanks. I try to keep you guys guessing. 🙂
Hi Craig,
I’ve always enjoyed the work of ee cummings (although his wife insisted that he never insisted his name be spelt in low case).
He was certainly a curious individual and his own explanation of the above poem, altered many times depending on whom he was addressing.(I like yours better)
The only explanation for his for enthusiastic support for Sen. Joe McCarthy must be a reaction to his visiting the then Stalinist USSR.
Yes. He really hated totalitarianism. I can understand that insofar as he was so into freedom and individual expression; it’s a theme that came out frequently in his work. Here’s another of my favorites that speaks to this: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-sing-olaf-glad-and-big.