Four Sonnets in the Modernist Manner

E. E. CUMMINGS

I

touching you i say (it being Spring and night) "let us go a very little beyond the last road—there's something to be found"

and smiling you answer "everything turns into something else, and slips away.... (these leaves are Thingish with moondrool and i'm ever so very little afraid")

i say

"along this particular road the moon if you'll notice follows us like a big yellow dog. You

don't believe? look hack. (Along the sand behind us, a big yellow dog that's... .now it's red a big red dog that may he owned by who knows)

only turn a little your. so. And there's the moon, there is something faithful and mad"

II

if i have made, my lady, intricate imperfect various things chiefly which wrong your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail) songs less firm than your body's whitest song upon my mind—if i have failed to snare the glance too shy—if through my singing slips the very skillful strangeness of your smile the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say "his most wise music stole nothing from death"—

you only will create (who are so perfectly alive) my shame: lady through whose profound and fragile lips the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

III

after all white horses are in bed

will you walking beside me, my very lady, if scarcely the somewhat city wiggles in considerable twilight

touch (now) with a suddenly unsaid

gesture lightly my eyes? And send life out of me and the night absolutely into me.... a wise and puerile moving of your arm will do suddenly that

will do

more than heroes beautifully in shrill armor colliding on huge blue horses, and the poets looked at them, and made verses,

through the sharp light cryingly as the knights flew.

IV

our touching hearts slenderly comprehend (clinging as fingers, loving one another gradually into hands) and bend into the huge disaster of the year:

like this most early single star which tugs

weakly at twilight, caught in thickening fear our slightly fingering spirits starve and smother; until autumn abruptly wholly hugs

our dying silent minds, which hand in hand at some window try to understand the

(through pale miles of perishing air, haunted with huddling infinite wishless melancholy, suddenly looming) accurate undaunted

moon's bright third tumbling slowly