This week’s poem is chosen for Valentine’s Day, and it’s “i carry your heart with me” by E.E. Cummings. It’s for everyone who has found love and everyone who hopes to.

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
E.E. Cummings (1894—1962)

Poem 254. i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

You might think that I’ve been uncharacteristically sloppy this week, but Cummings wrote much of his verse in lower case and with unconventional syntax and typography—the layout of his poems was as important to his artistic instincts as their content—and so I am respecting his choices.

The first stanza emphasises the intimate connection of love—each lover carries the other’s heart in their own so that they are never without it and everything they do seems to be done together.

The second stanza asserts that fate holds no surprises because your lover is your fate, and you want for nothing because you have everything you need in your love: they are the sun and the moon to you.

In the third stanza, Cummings describes love as “the deepest secret nobody knows”: the most primal thing, the root from which all roots spread; the bud from which all buds spring; and in a similar vein, the sky from which all skies are born—all the environment needed to grow a life that is vaster than any can conceive of: this is the marvellous thing that drives the whole universe, “the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart”.

I like this poem because it is simple but profound and like a lot of poems I’ve covered, it tells us something about love.

Poem 254. i carry your heart with me

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