i carry your heart with me(i carry it in Essay Questions

What is the relationship between this poem’s mechanical features (i.e. its punctuation, capitalization, figures of speech, and line breaks) and its themes?

The esoteric formal features in “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” are used purposefully to mirror key themes of the poem. For instance, the tiny lowercased “i” allows us to think about the notion of scale—the individual, and moreover, two individuals in love, are infinitely small compared to the universe in which suns and moons orbit and stars are “kept apart.” The parentheses convey the sense of “containedness” that is explored in various ways in this poem: The speaker carries another’s heart within their own heart, secrets are kept within the depths of the universe (in this poem, within parentheses), and the world we live in is contained in larger universes, to which this poem seems to travel. The lack of spacing after punctuation marks, which scrunches the different sentences together, perhaps reflects the world in which we live, and the small mind in which our thoughts take place. The line breaks, which feature sudden and unconventional enjambments, not only add to the irregular pace of the poem, but also make the poem more unpredictable—perhaps in the way that human beings are incapable of predicting what life has in store for them. By resisting conventions and common patterns, this poem encourages us to think about both the limitations of human thought and the mysteries of the universe.

Line 5—“i fear”— stands out for both its brevity and its spatial distance from its adjacent lines. What might be the reason Cummings isolates this statement? What is the poem saying about fear?

Considering that this poem spends a considerable number of lines discussing “secrets,” we may speculate that line 5 is a moment conveying the speaker’s hidden fear. While this notion of fear is immediately negated in the next line (“no fate”), “i fear” notably destabilizes the poem’s confidence about the power of love. The visual idiosyncrasies of line 5—the spacing of this line in respect to other lines, the lowercased “i,” and the deviation of this line from the fourteen-line form of the Shakespearean sonnet—isolate this line from the rest of the poem. Juxtaposed with the grand concepts of “fear” and the “world,” and celestial objects like the “sun” and the “moon,” the isolation of this line may imply the subconscious loneliness, peril, and anxiety one feels in love. Perhaps love, the basis of something as broad as life, may be too complex and overwhelming of a concept for an individual to grasp. The speaker, however, quickly moves on from this underlying fear, and goes back to their confident praise of love and life.