Index

ABSTRACT

The style is usually determined by way of language is used in a piece of writing. Language never runs yonder absorption of the supremacy of words. A word, thus, constitutes the basic unit of a language and contributes to the panache of writing in a composition. Words are meaning loaded blocks used to build on a writer's thoughts. A word is governed by a morphological makeup in itself and lies in close proximity and association with the other neighboring units as ‘lexico syntactic'. The style is language manipulated, and thus, literary language differs from ordinary language in various ways. However, literary language deviates from word to sentence level in a piece of literature without negatively affecting the meaning or flow of communication between the literary writer and his readers, which is the main focus of this paper. For this purpose, a poem: "Anyone Lived in A Pretty How Town" by a renowned American poet; E. E. Cummings, is selected and analyzed stylistically from word to text level. Cummings is acclaimed the most unconventional and ground-breaking poet of English literature. He is eminent for his abandoned, constant, and effective deviation from the established norms of syntax, lexis, punctuation, capitalization and graphic presentation. Obviously, very few poets have done such violence to language manipulation with such infallible poetic success. His poems relish different morphological makeups, syntactical combinations semantic organizations, pragmatic derivations and discourse patterns, but still these poems constitute good and effective literary compositions. However, discoursing literary tenets is not the concern of this study, rather it is focused on the linguistic applications of the language patterns being used with the help of textual analysis.  This analysis is based on Geoffrey N. Leech's theory of linguistic deviation which follows a three-step model: realization, form and semantics. The first step, realization, covers phonology and graphology; which mean speech sound production and word formation respectively. The second step reckons grammar; a set of rules that govern the structure of a language in totality, and lexicon; the available word choice for any write up. However, the last step, semantics, ends up in denotative and cognitive meanings of a text.  Phonological, graphological, morphological and syntactical devices are the main tackles of the study.

Keywords: Stylistics, Phonological deviations, Graphological deviations, Morphological deviation, Syntactical deviations, Semantic deviations, Foregrounded deviations.

DOI: 10.20448/801.41.1.13

Citation | Shaukat Khan; Khalid Azim Khan; Abdul Majeed Altayyab; Adnan Rashid Sheikh (2019). An Intratextual Analysis of “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” By E. E. Cummings. American Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 4(1): 1-13.

Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Funding : This study received no specific financial support.

Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

History : Received: 15 November 2018 / Revised: 18 December 2018 / Accepted: 21 January 2019 / Published: 8 March 2019.

Publisher: Online Science Publishing

1. INTRODUCTION

The last two decades witnessed some drastic shifts in the world of education in general and in linguistics in particular. Many literary theories provided a solid background for the analysis of writers' intentions, placement of characters and justification of readers' interpretation of the text. Bringing literature into the language classroom is the hallmark of the period. Resultantly, the literary text is placed in the language curricula along with text typo; i.e. advertisement, newspaper, magazine, internet, multi-model text and general knowledge text. It is a fact that the language used in literature is deviant from the normal mode i.e. day to day life communication in various ways. Literary writers are more concerned with content rather than the structure. They play upon words, basic patterns, and models of language usage to serve their purpose.

Stylistics is comparatively a new branch of linguistics, which studies literature from linguistic orientation. However, in this regard, there are contrary beliefs among the linguists. Halliday (1966) states, “Linguistics is not and will never be the whole of literary analysis, and only the literary analyst- not the linguist- can determine the place of linguistics in literary studies. But if a text is to be described at all, then it should be described properly; and this means by the theories and methods developed in linguistics, the subject whose task is precisely to show how language works” (p. 67).  A piece of literature constitutes a small world of its own, where the deviant and irregular language forms get regular and formal status.

Widdowson (1988) says, “The character of literature is that the language of a literary work should be fashioned into patterns over and above those required by the actual language system” (p.47). It means that literary language, unlike the day-to-day language; is deliberately turned and molded in order to fix it in the frame of literature. He further purports that the object of this patterning is to create acts of communication which are self-contained units, independent of a social context and expressive of a reality other than that which is sanctioned by convention (p.47). However, literary language does not correspond to normal modes of communication and is deviant from the normal language patterns. “In literary writing, however, one constantly comes across sentences which would not be generated by English grammar but which are nevertheless interpretable” (Widdowson, 1988). He further says, “Poets cannot simply ignore the normal meanings of words and invent entirely new meanings at will, since they are using a language code which already exists and upon which they depend for communication.”

E. E. Cummings; who is the subject of the present study, is the best example and the greatest practitioner of such language constructions. His work has been widely discussed in this regard because of its oddity in the frame of grammatical rules but it is covered under the perception that literature shows less extreme deviance from grammar rules. Here, it is necessary to throw some light on the point that in literature, we often come across sentences which are extremely deviant according to the grammar rules, but they are nevertheless interpretable in the context of a poem. Stylistics is comparatively a new branch of linguistics, and its subject is to make the study of literature from linguistic orientation. However, in this regard, there are contrary beliefs amongst the linguists. A piece of literature constitutes a small world of its own, where the deviant and irregular language forms get regular formal status. Such a possibility leads us into consideration that a piece of literature itself is a complete text and is governed by its own specific unstated rules. The question that arises in mind is how a literary writer uses or misuses grammatical rules for his desired motives to create a unique kind of discourse which is commonly known as ‘Literary Discourse'? Furthermore, how could one understand the ungrammatical constructions and what kind of understanding would get developed? Such questions revolve around the relationship between the grammaticalness of literary text and the interpretability of its discourse. This inquiry needs us to argue ‘literature as a discourse' in the next discussion.

2. E. E. CUMMINGS

Edward Estlin Cummings, widely known as E. E. Cummings, was born on 14th October, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the eldest child of his parents: Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. He was an inspiring American poet, an accomplished painter, a profound essayist, a prolific author, and a renowned playwright. He was the master and innovator of his own style of expression. In the world of literature, he went on a new path and paved a way for the upcoming writers to follow. To achieve his desired objectives, Cummings refurbished grammatical structures and linguistic principles. The assortment of Cummings' writing comprises of an enormous number of poems; i.e. approximately 2900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and various essays, with an addition of a hefty sum of drawings and paintings. Cummings is reminisced as a fundamental and most exuberant voice of all times.

3. RESEARCH STATEMENT

E. E. Cummings’ poem, “Anyone Lived in A Pretty How Town”, has distinctive morphological makeup, syntactical combinations, semantic organizations; pragmatic derivations and discourse patterns; but still constitutes a good and effective literary composition.

4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. How far the language, of the selected poem of E. E. Cummings, is deviant from the normal mode of communication and basic discourse patterns­?
2. Why extensive foregrounded deviations are used?
3. How far his unconventional way of writing is justifiable?

5. RESEARCH HYPOTHESES

A.  E. E. Cummings composed good pieces of literature without paying any heed to the
grammaticality of his language structure in his poem.
B.  E. E. Cummings is marked as most unconventional and groundbreaking poet of his time.
C.  ‘Style’ dominates ‘content’ in his poetry. 

6. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

As stated earlier the present study is purely theoretical and is aimed for the textual analysis of the selected poem. The research bears the following objectives:

1. To make a stylistic analysis of the selected poem
2. To find out and discuss Foregrounded Deviations i.e.

2.01 Phonological Deviations
2.02 Morphological Deviations
2.03 Syntactical Deviations
2.04 Semantic Deviations

1. To discuss Selection Restriction Rules Violation (SRRV)
2. To point out Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) defilement
3. Comparative analysis of literary language with the communicative language approach

7. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The present research is of immense importance in the sense that it caters to both teachers and learners of ‘Applied Linguistics'. The prime objective is to make a textual analysis of the selected poem, focusing on the selection of words, a formation of phrases, making sentences and compilation of literary texts. The study will find out the oddity of structures by the technique of compare and contrast with day to day language which is used for communicative purposes. The study will provide enough material to the practitioners of the discipline in the classroom; thus, the study attains the pedagogical applications. It will also help the students of Applied Linguistics by providing them enough data for analysis. It will enrich their practice of stylistic analysis of literary compositions at first stage and will open new channels to build up insight for conducting new studies in the relevant field. Moreover, the study extends its circulation to the learners of the English language and EFL teachers too. Such studies can be taken into the EFL/ESL classroom and could be effectively exploited for teaching English language. It's a modern approach to the teaching/learning of languages to practice some text with the target learners, where they have plenty of examples, which are incorrect according to the basic language convention, but for their desired motives, literary writers have manipulated them in their compositions. In this regard, E. E. Cummings stands out among his fellow writers and provides very rich literary compositions to his readers.

8. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The present study is based on Leech (1969) theories of linguistic deviation. This framework allows the analysis of various variabilities of language to be piloted on three steps model: Realization, Form and Semantics. The first step: Realization covers phonology and graphology, i.e. speech sounds production and word formation respectively. The second step reckons grammar; a set of rules that govern the structure of a language in totality, and lexicon which is the available word choice for any write-up. However, the last step: Semantics ends up in denotative and cognitive meanings of a text. In 1966, Leech issued "Linguistic and the Figure of Rhetoric"; which divides foregrounding into two sections i.e. syntagmatic foregrounding which is also termed as parallelism and paradigmatic foregrounding known as deviation. Leech further divides deviation into eight substantial categories: Lexical deviation; which is the deviation based on available best word choice, grammatical deviation; means throwing structure governing rules away, phonological deviation; nonconformity to speech sounds,  graphological deviation; shooting off word formation process, semantic deviation; unconventionality of meaning, and dialectical deviation; fusion of language variations, deviation based on register; deviation from some specific professional language pattern,  and Deviation across a historical period; language change along with the time flow. The present study is intended to utilize Leech's linguistic deviation theory based on three levels: realization, form and semantics, as a checklist for analyzing E. E. Cummings' selected poem. The study is obviously practical and purely academic; however, to unfold the aesthetic flavor and artistic beauty of E. E. Cummings poetry is the underlying current of the process. 

9. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

The present study is purely based on the theoretical framework without any implication of practical or action research. The intratextual analysis of the selected poem is to be made focusing on the basic language units and patterns. The analysis will range from word to the text level. For this purpose, basic linguistic parameters i.e. morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and literary discourse will be taken into consideration to substantiate the analysis. After the detailed analysis, the data will be presented in tabulated forms to make it more vivid, graphics and elaborate. No statistical tools or numeric data is under consideration

10. PROCEDURE

Throughout this study, the interpretation of literary discourse has been made as a vibrant perceptual process or a cognitive activity. Thus, all findings have been scrutinized by the methodical solicitation of the theories and perceptions of Pragmatics and Cognitive Stylistics on the intra-textual data obtained from the objects of study—the poem. In this regard, the theory of foregrounding and the theory of schema have been employed. At some places, instances from run-of-the-mill discourse intended to explicate a certain point, through comparison or contrast, about some part of the poetic discourse in question as it is a basic premise of Stylistics to link the literary modes of discourse to the non-literary ones, rather than alienating the two. Most of the technical terms employed in the findings section belong to the shared jargon of all branches of General and Applied Linguistics, and their definitions can be easily found in any resource-book of Linguistics.

Total words: 234
Functional words: 82 = 35.04%
Content words: 152 = 64.95

11. ANALYSIS

Stanza No. 01, (lines 1-4)

The poem starts with an unusual note of using ‘anyone' as the subject of the title sentence. Anyone is a pronoun which means ‘anybody' or ‘any person'. It is written as one word: Does anyone know my name? Written as a two-word phrase, the meaning changes slightly to designate an individual member of a group of persons or things. In the second case, it is usually followed by ‘of'. For example: Can anyone of you speak Arabic? But neither of the usages nor meanings is fit in the context of the poem as a sentence-initial subject. Instead of ‘anyone' 'someone' makes better sense as a subject of the title line. The overall tone of the sentence is interrogative but the structure is declarative, making thus a statement rather than a query or a question. ‘How' is commonly used for making questions in the English language but here its usage is eye-catching. ‘How' is used here as a proper noun because it is followed by the common noun ‘town' and preceded by the adjective 'pretty.' Thus the word ‘pretty' qualifies the phrase ‘how town'. By reading the title line of the poem, readers get alert that the writer is making some sort of inquiry about the ‘how town'. To decide upon its grammatical structure and semantics, readers can rely on the punctuation mark at the end, but as a title, it doesn't allow any punctuation mark at the end. However, the same title is repeated as the first line of the poem without bearing any mark at the end, which further adds to the confusion of readers' understanding. The second line is parenthesized which gives a sense that it is the explanation to the first line. But the fact is that it further baffles the common readers' comprehension due to its oddity of syntactical order and morphological composition. The sentence ‘(with up so floating many bells down)' needs modifications and rearranged syntactical order. It should be syntactically arranged as ‘with so many up bells floating down'. But even if it could be sequenced up in the suggested manner, it would run counter to the rules of grammar, especially semantics. Grammatically, in order to fulfill the present continuous tense requirements, the sentence is missing the auxiliary verb "are" or "were" in case of past progressive tense. Semantically, the sentence bears oddity because of the erroneous subject-verb agreement. The word ‘floating' doesn't go with the noun ‘bell'. Thus, the sentence constitutes a non-permissible sequence. The preposition ‘with' seems superfluous and could be a poetic need to balance out the word 'count,' but linguistically, it's irritating the readers understanding or flow of thoughts. The next line states the four seasons of an academic calendar year and a typical climatic region. It also tries to give a perennial touch to the poem, but the weathers or seasons are arranged not in their natural occurrence; rather, they are reshuffled to derive desired poetic objectives. The last line of the first stanza starts with the pronoun ‘he' which constitutes an anaphoric reference to the previously stated subject ‘anyone'. The repetitive uses of the masculine pronoun in its subjective case ‘he' as well as a possessive case ‘his' further complicates things. The blend of negative and affirmative clauses in the same sentence, and the use of past simple tense without the specification of time occurrence makes it ungrammatical. According to normal traditional grammar rules, the past simple tense is used to speak of an action that happened in the past at a specific time. Here no such time referral of an action happening is given or can be deduced from the context of the poem.

Stanza No. 02, (lines 5-8)

The second stanza starts with the collocation ‘women and men’. Linguistically, collocation means the co-occurrence of lexical items, as in bread and butter, black and white, commit with crime etc. Here in this poem, even collocations are shuffled from the normal occurrence. We do use ‘men and women’ but not the other way round i.e. ‘women and men’. The next part of the line is again parenthesized in an unusual manner. Firstly, the collocation is made up of two identical lexical items, i.e. little and small. Both are adjectives but little is mostly used with countable and uncountable nouns, like little value or importance, little boy or girl. Small is also used with both countable and uncountable nouns like small number of people and small room or building. But here two adjectives are collocated and are used for men and women. Both the adjectives look funny with their qualified nouns like little and small women, little and small men. Furthermore, the word, ‘both,’ is used for referring to two persons or objects. But here the word ‘both’ is followed by collocation little and small which looks odd. If the same subject is extended to the second line, it would look like, ‘women and men cared for anyone not at all’. Here the negative structure of the sentence in the past simple is unconventional and blatant violation. It should be structured like ‘women and men didn’t care for anyone at all’. The next line displays the same violation of grammatical rules. It is ‘they sowed their isn’t they reaped their’. It should be patterned as ‘they didn’t sow…….’ Here is a fun word ‘their’ too, and is a selection restriction rules violation. It should be ‘they didn’t sow their, they reaped their’. Four heavenly bodies are mentioned at the end of the stanza in congruence with the four seasons in the first stanza.

Stanza No.03, (lines 9-12)

The third stanza is comparatively less twisted and confusing. If the parenthesized part of it is taken out for the time being, the remaining sentence would look like, ‘children guessed that no one loved him more and more’.  Here a few charges are leveled against it. First of all, two words are unnecessarily joined together as ‘noone’. The negative particle should be separate from the noun and should be written as ‘no one’. Secondly, the possessive case of the pronoun ‘his’ is used in the line, but its antecedent is a plural noun, i.e. ‘children’. So, the pronoun should match its antecedent. It should be ‘children guessed that no one loved them more and more’. The last two words are collocated ‘more and more’ for intensity. The parenthesized component of the stanza (but only a few and down they forgot as up they grew), needs modification. First of all particle displacement is unnecessary and it should be restored as ‘they grew up’ instead of ‘as they up grew’. Secondly, the syntactic order is wrong and needs changing. The possible permissible logical sequence could be ‘but only a few as they grew up, they forgot down’. Again the four seasons of the calendar are stated but unlike the first stanza of the poem, this time they are rearranged in accordance to the poetic compilation.

Stanza No. 04, (lines 13-16)

Every stanza covers a separate but an additional subject in the whole composite of the poem. Like the previous stanzas, the fourth stanza makes an unprecedented usage of a ‘by' phrase. Usually, a by-phrase is considered as a passive marker in a sentence. But here, its use isn't meant for passive derivation; rather, it is meant for certain other desired objectives. At the start of the stanza, the adverbials ‘when' and ‘now' are collocated as ‘when by now'. Usually, it's ‘by now and then,' but here 'then' is inter-substituted with ‘when,' which seems a unique Semantic extension on the part of the poet. In the same line, the next juxtaposition is ‘tree by leaf'. If we take the prepositional consideration here, then it should have been ‘leaf by tree’. The whole stanza is stating a number of juxtapositions like ‘leaf by tree’, ‘when by then’, ‘grief and joy’, ‘bird by snow’, ‘stir by still’. Such linguistic parallelism gives it high musicality, rhythm and flow which are the essential features of poetry. Here the third person pronouns in their subjective cases as ‘she and he’ and their equivalent possessive cases as ‘his and her’ are difficult to link with any antecedent in the poem. Thus, they are difficult to know as no explicit anaphoric or cataphoric reference has been made. In the last line of stanza four, the use of ‘anyone’s’ is also perplexing. According to the grammar rules, the word anyone does not take an apostrophe followed by ‘s’ as possessive marker. ‘Anyone’s any’ is an extremely anonymous subject to link with any homophoric reference.  

Stanza No. 05, (lines 17-20)

The first line of the stanza is deviant in many ways. First of all, someone is a pronoun which is used for an anonymous single person to which 's' has been added to derive plurality of the lexeme. In reality it doesn’t have a plural meaning but is used to refer to a single unknown or unspecified person. Secondly, someone is referred back by the possessive pronoun ‘their’ which is the third person plural pronoun in possessive case. Thus, the possessive pronoun and its antecedent do not match. It constitutes a weak referral in the poem. Similarly, 'everyone' is treated in an unconventional manner. It has been tagged with a tail as suffix ‘S’ for deriving plurality but according to the norms of language, it doesn’t accept such illogical tails. The stanza is loaded with paradoxical statements which make it more difficult and challenging for the common reader to understand. Paradox is “a statement or expression so surprisingly self-contradictory as to provoke us into seeking another sense or context in which it would be true (although some paradoxes cannot be resolved into truths, and must remain self-contradictory). Examples of paradoxical expressions are ‘laughed their cryings’, ‘sleep wake’ and ‘said their nevers’. Throughout the stanza ‘S’ addition to words as suffix for plurality is added which is ungrammatical and deviant. The word ‘crying’ is a verb to which 's' has been added, treating it as a noun--something of a  morphological deviation. Word plays are common in the poem. Words are reshuffled and rearranged time and again for certainly desired motives. Sometimes it is written as ‘slept their dreams' and at another place, it becomes, ‘dream their sleep'. Furthermore, ‘sleep' is a primarily intransitive verb which means it doesn't need the direct object in a sentence to give a complete sense or thought, but here it has been supplemented with a direct object and thus 'sleep' has been used as a transitive verb. Language has been manipulated as subservient to the flow of the poet's thoughts rather than as a medium to give an outlet and free expression to the poets' thought of ideas.     

Stanza No. 06, (lines 21-24)

Stanza six starts by mentioning the four heavenly bodies, i.e. stars, rain, sun and moon. This phrase is repeated for the third time in the poem so far and has taken the prominence of a refrain in poetic composition. These natural bodies have been personified by associating human like qualities. For example, in the second line of stanza five, Cummings says, “Only the snow can begin to explain”. Here snow has been personified by associating with it the human faculty of thinking and explaining. The model auxiliary verb ‘can’ is also suggestive of its meaning of probability and possibility. The determiner ‘only’ makes it more specific and stands it out in the list of other objects that only and only snow can explain about the children. Here snow has been spoken of as an observer of children and capable of interpreting and justifying their ways of life. The third line is interrogative in nature but affirmative in meaning. ‘How children are apt to forget to remember’. The use of oxymoron in the third line is eye catching for the readers. Oxymoron is a figure of speech which combines two usually contradictory terms in a compressed paradox like telling bitter sweet, truthful joke etc. Here the phrase ‘forget to remember’ is a good example of oxymoron which adds to the words economy and rhythm. The second line of the first stanza is repeated here as a refrain which has attained the status of a catchphrase in the mind of a reader. The sentence ‘(with up so floating many bells down)’ requires a rearranged syntactical order. It should be syntactically arranged as ‘so many up bells floating down’. But even if it could be sequenced up in the proposed way, it would run under double charge of grammar and semantics. Grammatically, in order to accomplish the present continuous tense requirements, the sentence is missing the auxiliary verbs “are” or “were” in case of past progressive tense. Semantically, the sentence bears oddity because of the erroneous subject verb agreement. The word ‘floating’ is not in accordance with the noun ‘bell’. Thus, the sentence constitutes a non-permissible sequence. The preposition ‘with’ seems superfluous and could only be a poetic need to balance out the word count, but linguistically, it’s irritating the readers’ understanding or flow of thoughts.

Stanza No. 07, (lines 25-28)

The stanza starts with a contradictory note by stating the verb phrase ‘anyone died’. This verb phrase is contradictory to the verb phrase in the title line, ‘any one lived’. The first person singular pronoun in its subjective case ‘I’ is used, which makes it a highly subjective composition. It runs upstream the nature of poetry which is usually subjective-cum-objective documentary. Syntactically, the sentence needs changes to accomplish grammar requisites. Instead of ‘one day anyone died I guess’, it should be ‘I guess one day anyone died’. Furthermore, 'anyone' calls for substitution by ‘someone’. Anyone is a pronoun which means ‘anybody’ or ‘any person’. The next line is violating graphology rules by deriving the past form of ‘stop’ by adding ‘ed’ and doubling the vowel sound ‘o’. According to the standard rule of grammar in general and spellings in particular, ‘stop’ as a regular verb takes ‘ed’ suffix for deriving its past and past participle forms with slight addition to the stem by making the last consonant sound double, as in stop- stopped- stopped. Here it’s the other way round. Cummings has committed graphological and morphological deviations by inserting an additional vowel sound in the middle of the word, as in   stop- stooped- stooped. Another example of grammatical violation is uneven compounding of ‘noone’. Two separate words are combined together without any need. They should be written separately like ‘no one’. The use of third person singular masculine pronoun in its possessive case is making an anaphoric reference to its antecedent; the subject of this stanza, 'anyone.' But the next line is making a strange anaphoric reference by using the third person plural pronoun objective case ‘them’. ‘Busy folk buried them side by side’. Linguistic parallelism is evident from the phrase ‘side by side’, ‘little by little’ and ‘was by was’. The third example of collocation, i.e. ‘was by was’ is unconventional and irregular. Two ‘be’ form verbs are collocated here, which is unprecedented.

Stanza No. 08, (lines 29- 32)

The second to last stanza is full of collocations where some of them really pose challenges for average readers. ‘All by all’, ‘deep by deep’, ‘more by moe’, and ‘earth by april’ are juxtaposed in a single stanza. It is difficult to link and to deduce sense out of them. ‘All by all’, ‘deep by deep’, ‘more by moe’ are good example of epizeuxis. Epizeuxis is a rhetorical figure of speech by which a word is repeated for emphasis, with no other words intervening.  ‘More by moe’ is imbalance in itself. The omission of ‘r’ in the more is making it another word and is totally a different derivation. It comes equally under the charge of graphological and morphological deviation. Standard rules are violated, and it is a deviant ‘style’ in many ways. The clause in the second line, i.e. ‘they dream their sleep,’ is an oddity. We heard of sleeping dreams and day dreaming expressions but in the world of Cummings readers have been experiencing novel expressions and compositions. The use of ‘noone’ is repeated here which has already been commented. The two words are unnecessarily joined together as ‘noone’. The negative particle should be separated from the noun and should be written as ‘no one’. In the last collocation ‘earth by april’, proper nouns should be written with capital letters like April. Secondly, earth by April doesn’t make any sense here and is difficult to correlate with the ongoing flow of the poem. The last line of the stanza is unnecessarily moved away and is given space. However, ‘wish by spirit and if by yes’ is strange words combinations. The last collocated phrase, ‘if by yes’ seems child play with words placement.       

Stanza No. 09, (lines 33- 36)

The last stanza of this long poem of thirty six lines is the refrain of the poem and it seems a buzzword of the poet. The second stanza of the poem is a little modified and painted in a new color. ‘Women and men (both dong and ding)’. As already commented, the expression  is usually written as 'men and women,' but here the order has been reversed for deriving certain aims and objectives of the poet. The second collocated phrase ‘dong and ding’ is also reversed. The right usage is ‘ding dong’ which refers to the bell sound and is commonly used in children’s poems for its high pitch musicality, but Cummings has reversed the expressions for his personal motives. In the second line, for attaining alliteration, the word ‘autumn’ is changed to ‘sutumn’ which adds to the rhythm and musicality of the line but strongly deviates from the normal language usage. If the subject of the stanza is linked with the third line here, it would look like, ‘women and men reaped their sowing and went their came’. Here the second phrase ‘and went their came’ is ambiguous. It means that women and men went back there, from where ever they came. In simple words, they returned to their place but it has been made quite intricate and difficult to comprehend. Usually, a writer fixes a level of reading for which s/he writes. But poets in general and E. E. Cummings in particular are usually least concerned about their readership. E. E. Cummings, as usual, enjoys language play and fun game in this poem. That’s the reason that he has been marked out as most unconventional and ground breaking poet in the realm of his fellow poets’ list.    

REFERNCES

Halliday, M.A.K., 1966. Patterns of language: Papers in general, descriptive and applied linguistics. UK: Longman Press.

Leech, G.N., 1969. A linguistic guide to English poetry. London: Longman.

Widdowson, H.G., 1988. Stylistics and the teaching of literature. Harlow, Essex CM20 2JE England: Longman House, Burnt Mill.