Cummings wrote a plethora of poems on the subject of love. According to Norman Friedman, love “is Cummings' chief subject of interest . . . Not only the lover and his lady, but love itself—its quality, its value, its feel, its meaning—is a subject of continuing concern.” Using a diversity of forms, voices, and images, Cummings explored the various sensations one may experience in romantic life.
As he does in “All in green went my love riding,” one of his best known poems about romance, Cummings often uses natural imagery in his love poems. “i have found what you are like,” for example, compares the speaker’s lover to “the rain,” their smile to the “stirring of birds between my arms.” “in time of daffodils” uses the various meanings of flowers to explore the significance of remembrance in love. “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in,” another one of Cummings’s well-known pieces, compares love to the moon, sun, trees, and other natural objects. By incorporating elements of nature into his poems, Cummings not only demonstrates the imagist technique of conjuring emotion through imagery, but also hearkens back to older traditions of pastoral poetry, love ballads, and sonnets.
Cummings not only wrote imagistic love poems like “All in green went my love riding” but also a great number of risqué poems that focus more on the physical experience of love. Some of his most celebrated erotic poems include “may i feel said he” (“may i feel said he / (i’ll squeal said she / just once said he) / it’s fun said she”), “i like my body when it is with your” (“i like your body. i like what it does, / i like its hows.”) and “lady i will touch you” (“Lady, i will touch you with my mind”). In both his erotic poems and his G-rated ones, Cummings wrote about love and its various forms.
