Today’s Poem: the moon looked into my window

a fragile light bent gatheringly

John Atkinson Grimshaw, A Wet Moon, Putney Road, 1886 (Wikimedia Commons)

the moon looked into my window

by E.E. Cummings

the moon looked into my window
it touched me with its small hands
and with curling infantile
fingers it understood my eyes cheeks mouth
its hands(slipping)felt of my necktie wandered
against my shirt and into my body the
sharp things fingered tinily my heart life

the little hands withdrew, jerkily, themselves
quietly they began playing with a button
the moon smiled she
let go my vest and crept
through the window
she did not fall
she went creeping along the air
                               over houses
                                          roofs

And out of the east toward
her a fragile light bent gatheringly
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If we set aside the typography — the missing capitals, the odd parentheses, the deliberate indentations — a curious picture of E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) swims into view. Oh, he’s still a modernist and a deliberate breaker of ordinary diction, but he is also a deep sentimentalist, even as he tries to mask his sentimentality with all the devices of his twisty poetry.

E.E. Cummings, c. 1930 (Vanity Fair)

Once we set aside such deliberately sarcastic poetry as “next to of course god america i,” we can discern his efforts to strip sentimentality of over-worn phrasings — while not stripping the content of whatever gave rise to its place as a sentimental topic.

His repeated references to the moon offer an example:

• “little child,” he writes, “sleep . . . / big moon / (enter / us)”
• “love is,” he adds, “most mad and moonly / and less it shall unbe / than all the sea”
• “the moon(with white wig and polished buttons)would take you away”
• “the moon over death over edgar the moon”
• “a moon is / as round as)Death”
• “delicious dancing” with “the Humorous / moon”
• “The trees, / suddenly wait against the moon’s face”
• “the moon / singing desire into begin / joy was his song”

Or take “the moon looked into my window,” Today’s Poem. Cummings published it in his 1926 volume, “is 5” (the second of poems in that book with the word “moon” in the title). Here the moonlight slips through the window like a child, her small hands fingering his tie and shirt, “playing with a button.” 

Then the moonlight slips back out the window as the arc across the sky moves the moon beyond the window: “she did not fall / she went creeping along the air / over houses / roofs.” The actor Alec Guinness once gave the lines a characteristically gentle reading that matches the poem’s mood. The thought is sentimental, as so often with E.E. Cummings. And equally as often, the sentimentality is stripped of as much sentiment as the poet can manage.

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