9 by E.E. Cummings

E.E. Cummings was able to captivate me by his modern-esque style of poetry and prose around the summer of my sophomore year in high school. My personal favorites of his works included Maggie and Milly and Molly and May with the beautiful line, “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea.”, Somewhere I have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond, and The Boys I mean are not refined. Encountering his poem entitled “9” in class was something that rekindled my excitement. Because E.E. Cummings was known for his themes on love and sex^[1] as well as his unique disregard for capitalization and punctuation^[2], he was appreciated by both the young and old alike. 

9 is a poem that is no exception of Cummings' brilliantly unabashed exhibition of his new style of writing prose. 

there are so many tictoc

clocks everywhere telling people

what toctic time it is for

tictic instance five toc minutes toc

past six tic

The first stanza illustrates the short-lived moments that people experience in life. The theme of the passage, I think, is that time is a grave enemy of man. While reading the 'tictoc's and 'toctic's in the passage, I was, sufficed to say, annoyed. In application, when one is being rushed or is constantly pressured by time, he/she is usually displeased by this. 

Spring is not regulated and does

not get out of order nor do

its hands a little jerking move

over numbers slowly

                                 we do not

wind it up it has no weights

springs wheels inside of

its slender self no indeed dear

nothing of the kind.

The second and the third stanza highlights the contrasting effect of time; Spring, which usually means a new beginning- a beautiful thing after the fleeting moments in time. Cummings was able to describe spring as (1) not regulated, (2) does not get out of order, and (3) despite time passing, spring always comes. The third description rings true to the first and second description in a way that spring always takes places when anyone does not need to control or maintain it.

(So, when kiss Spring comes

we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss

lips because tic clocks toc don't make

a toctic difference

to kisskiss you and to 

kiss me)

The last stanza, as I see it, is the most striking part of the poem. Without the repetition of 'kiss' and 'tic toc's, it is "So, when spring comes we'll kiss each other on the lips because clocks don't make a difference to you and to me". The conglomeration of spring and time by E.E. Cummings. Such a simple but magnificent way to say that true love transcends time. The romantic in me is in awe, I might have to overuse that line and write it on the margins and back portions of my notebooks (and yes, embarrassingly, I still do that). The cynic in me, however, will scrutinize the alliteration of kiss and the sound of time passing on a clock as a dreamlike and ephemeral characteristic of all romantic love. On the other hand, my cynicism depends if I'm having a hormonal imbalance.