[love is more thicker than forget]

Except for perhaps the dynamic between humanity and the forces of nature and the speculations about the soul and its relationship to anything eternal, no subject has generated more lyrical poetry than love. Indeed, to subject a love poem to analysis might actually be counter-indicated. After all, love is an emotion, impossible to anticipate and happily, joyfully resistant to logic. The heart has a mind of its own. Analysis, by its definition, uses the careful and calculated step-by-step process of scientific objectivity to create causality, to link events and move toward some inevitable outcome. Cummings here attempts the daunting task of understanding love into its elements, knowing the enterprise is happily impossible. What is love, the speaker asks. How does it work? What are its impacts? What are its dimensions?

The answers the poem offers are hardly new. Indeed, the assertions made about the nature of love here are surprisingly obvious, even clichés. The tectonic impact of love is impossible to forget. Love does not happen very often. Love can compel a person to act in extraordinarily unpredictable ways. Love will exist as long as humanity exists—it defies the iron limits of time. Love is not about winning; or losing, for that matter. Love can begin so quietly it can go unnoticed even as it evolves, grows like any organic, living thing. Love is eternal in defiance of a world where just about everything else dies. In that, love is a kind of supranatural reality that, in its best expression, gives each of us a glimpse into something grander, finer, higher than our day-to-day existence. Love transcends the tawdry ordinary and allows the heart (and the soul) to touch the ideal that lurks beyond the apparent, the immediate.

It is, on the whole, a familiar argument about love. The poem does not challenge the popular perceptions of love’s compelling impact. Any of these observations the poet makes would not be out of place being recited during a wedding ceremony or quoted in a Valentine’s Day greeting card. Yes, of course, that is love. The very nature of the poem’s argument would seem to trivialize that argument—yes, we heard all this before. In fact, only the most cynical, the most skeptical, or those whose experiences with love to date have been, to borrow the speaker’s logic, the too-frequent failures of love would quarrel with the poem’s argument. Even then, the heart being the heart clings to sometimes the barest hope that maybe next time love will be exactly like this.

The poem then confronts how to make new the familiar clichés of love as eternal and powerful and confusing and wonderful all at the same time. To make the familiar new, the poem reinvents language, stuns with lines that invert grammatical constructs and sometimes outright violates grammatical rules, reimagine parts of speech (nouns used as verbs; adverbs used as adjectives; verbs used as nouns), upend even the most conventional rules of capitalization and syntax. Unbe is not a word. Nor is sunly or moonly—and yet despite that reality, the newly-coined words convey, they share, they work, and in doing suggest a kind of happy guerrilla action against the conventional, which is, the poem argues, exactly the sensation of falling in love. The best way to make the idea and the experience of love new is to make new the language we use to define it. The poem startles not because of its argument but rather because of how it makes that argument.

The poem’s reading often perplexes. Consider these lines, for instance: “and less it shall unbe / than all the sea which only / is deeper than the sea” (Lines 6-8). The word order intimidates, the sense seems to elude until it is “translated” into conventional structures. To say that love is as timeless as the sea itself seems thin, tired, its impact mitigated because it seems so, well, cliché. The poem stuns by reinventing, or more precisely reinvigorating language. The poem uses less and more to create an uneasy sense of approach. The double negative here—"less it shall unbe” (Line 6)—plus the neologism (“unbe”) upends expectations for language and for how ideas are shared. Like falling in love, reading the poem demands dropping your guard and opening yourself up to something at once intimidating but in the end revelatory. Like love itself, the lines defy logic and yet manage to be logical, to make a case. What is the sea deeper than the sea? The sea, of course. By casing the familiar in unfamiliar phrasing, the poem teases, entices, coaxes, and lures the reader to step away from conventional expectations and to allow the new to reanimate something familiar.

The speaker later affirms that “love is less always than to win” (Line 9); the phrasing seems contradictory because it yokes “less” with “always.” The two concepts violate each other. Less goes with never, more goes with always. Line 9 argues that love is not about winning—the dreariness and cliché of that phrasing gets reimagined by the violation of grammatical expectations. The poem itself suggests how love itself, repeated over and over, nevertheless feels new, feels different within each person’s heart.

Happily then, the poem reinvents language itself to create the feel of a complex emotion that itself defies, ultimately, any attempt to define it. The poem uses unexpected syntax, shuffled lines, ungrammatical constructs, and innovative word choices to create in reading the contradictory, dazzling feeling of the first rush of love. Like love, the poem demands embracing the unexpected. In the end, analyzing Cummings’s love poem runs counter to the poem’s very argument. Love defies analysis, rejects understanding, refuses to be what is expected. The poem, like love, is best approached as an experience, not a thing. It should be read aloud, not analyzed. The poem gives the reader a chance, unique among centuries of love poetry dating back to Antiquity, to relish the experience of the unexpected.