i carry your heart with me(i carry it in Literary Elements

In second-person statements, the speaker, unnamed and ungendered, expresses their deep love for another person who is the addressee (the “you”) of this poem.

Shakespearean sonnet with major variations (slant rhymes, enjambments, irregular meter)

“i carry your heart with me” (metaphor): The speaker compares love to a tangible object that one can carry to different spaces.
“you are my fate […] you are my world” (metaphor): By comparing the addressee to the abstract ideas of “fate” and the “world,” the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of their love.
“you are whatever a moon has always meant […] whatever a sun will always sing is you” (metaphor): The meaning of the lover to the speaker is compared to the various meanings assigned to the sun and the moon—imperishability, the passage of time, artistic inspiration, and so on.
“a tree called life” (simile): The speaker compares life to a tree that grows high, and whose buds, roots, and canopy are made of the speaker’s romantic feelings for the addressee.

Alliteration:
“i fear / no fate”: “f” sounds
“i want / no world”: “w” sounds
“whatever a moon has always meant”: “m” sounds
“whatever a sun will always sing”: “s” sounds
“deepest secret”: Alliterative internal slant rhyme of the long “e” followed by consonant then short “e”
“root of the root […] bud of the bud […] sky of the sky”: alliteration of the “r,” “b”, “s” through repetition of the same word

Assonance:
“soul can hope”: assonance of the long “o”
“mind can hide”: assonance of the long “i”
"stars apart”: internal slant rhyme of the “ar”

Though they are not examples of situational or verbal irony per se, lines 5 to 7 (“i fear / no fate,” “i want / no world”) defy our expectations by following what seem to be statements of fear and desire with immediate negations.

Modernist poetry, love poetry

Unspecified, abstract

Affectionate, assertive, laudatory

There seems to be no antagonist in this love poem.

There is no visible conflict or obstacle—the speaker simply describes his romantic feelings for his lover. (A potential and underlying source of conflict, however, is the ambiguity of whether the addressee of this poem reciprocates these feelings.)

The poem reaches its most intense moment in the second stanza, where the speaker uses hyperboles to describe the scale and intensity of their love.

Although this poem does not contain any explicit references to other texts, it draws significantly on the tradition of metaphysical poetry in 17th-century England when it discusses love using celestial bodies (the sun, moon, stars) and emphasizes disparities in scale (the love between two individuals vs. the grand laws of nature).

The form of this poem also borrows from that of the Shakespearean sonnet, which contains 14 lines and follows the “ABAB CDCD EFEF GG” rhyme scheme. Cummings, though, parodies this form by separating one of the lines into two (“by only me […] my darling / i fear”) and using slant rhymes (“in/done,” “anywhere/fear”) and eye rhymes (“want/meant”) in addition to the exact rhymes (“knows/grows,” “apart/heart”).

“keeping the stars apart” (metonymy): In this line, the speaker is describing love as the laws of nature; here, the stars are a metonym for all natural objects.

“whatever a sun will always sing is you”: When the sun is "singing," it is performing a human quality. Modifying this personification with the adverb “always,” the speaker emphasizes the perpetuity of the lover’s beauty.

The entire poem depends heavily upon hyperbolic language. The speaker exaggerates their love by using generalizations like “anywhere,” “whatever,” and “nobody,” superlatives like “deepest,” and comparatives like “higher.” The speaker also compares the addressee to grand and abstract concepts such as “fate,” the “world,” and to celestial bodies like the “moon” and the “sun.” By using partitives like “root of the root,” “bud of the bud,” and “sky of the sky of a tree,” the speaker emphasizes the extremity of their love.