Summary
“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” opens with the speaker’s statement that they carry their beloved’s (the addressee’s) heart with them everywhere. The first four lines consist of the confession that the speaker and their beloved are one.
Line 5 (“i fear”), which marks a turn from the previous lines, begins a series of descriptions of what the addressee means to the speaker. The speaker does not fear fate because their beloved is their fate, and does not want the world because their beloved is their world. The addressee is like the sun and moon to the speaker, who seeks inspiration, perceives time, and seeks the meaning of life through the existence of their beloved.
In stanza 2, the speaker states that love is the basis for life. They make an analogy between the root, bud, and canopy of a tree and the relationship between love and life. According to the speaker, love is greater than the human mind can fathom, and is the secret to the wonders of the universe.
The final stanza is a one-liner in which the speaker repeats the first sentence and parenthetical statement of the poem, re-emphasizing the magnitude of their love for the addressee.
Analysis
Stanza 1 of “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” can be divided into two parts. The first part—lines 1 to 4—clarifies the subject and addressee of the poem, as well as the relationship between the speaker and the addressee. In a very assertive and straightforward tone, the speaker addresses their beloved in the second person and states that their love keeps the two of them together, wherever and whenever. Using words like “never,” “anywhere,” “whatever,” and “only,” the speaker emphasizes the absolute nature of their love. Love, here, is also perceived by the speaker as a physical object that has a shape, form, and location. The “spatial” properties of the speaker’s love are the elements that define its magnitude—it contains the beloved’s heart, and accompanies the speaker everywhere. In addition to introducing the subject matter and some of the key themes, the first half of the first stanza introduces the formal idiosyncrasies of the poem: the lowercase “i" and parentheses, which gesture toward the small and the private, as well as the lack of spaces between punctuation marks, which not only break the conventions of poetry, but also render the poem “tighter,” and somewhat more intimate.
The second half of the first stanza (lines 5 to 9) is marked by a significant change in style that begins with line 5. The typographic isolation of the line “i fear” creates a sense of disjointedness and anxiety that shifts our sense of the previous lines' quirky tone. Line 6, however, quite unexpectedly negates this notion of fear and leads to a parenthetical statement describing how the speaker’s beloved is the speaker’s fate. Lines 6 and 7 repeat this element of surprise. Then, in lines 8 and 9, Cummings uses astronomical imagery to describe how much the addressee means to the speaker—here, the poem evokes the language of the metaphysical poets (who wrote in 17th-century England), who also used grand images, like those of the sun and the moon, to talk about paradoxes and disparities in scale. The second half of this stanza thus expands the thematic scope of the poem (by introducing celestial objects that symbolize eternity, art, and time) and uses brief moments of irony and surprise to describe the absolute nature of the speaker’s love. It is in this part of the poem that we also see a pattern of slant rhymes (“want/meant” “true/you”) reminiscent of the Shakespearean sonnet structure (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG).
Stanza 2, then, moves on from the subject of love to the matter of life. Here, we see Cummings incorporating more natural imagery, more observations on scale and size, and more hyperboles. In lines 11 and 12, the speaker compares life to a tree, and love to a “root,” “bud,” and “sky,” thus arguing metaphorically that love is the foundation, product, and destiny of life. The repetition of partitives (“root of the root,” “bud of the bud,” “sky of the sky”) emphasizes how absolute is the significance of love as both a means and an end of human existence. Line 13 not only wraps up this analogy with a description of the limitlessness of this “tree called life,” but also add rhythm through the assonances of “soul can hope” and “mind can hide.” Lines 11 through 13, parenthesized, contain the “deepest secret” mentioned in line 10, and once again, we see things and ideas being “contained” both visually and conceptually. Line 14 refers to this parenthetical statement as the “wonder,” or mysterious natural law, upon which the world operates—the secret behind the position of the stars, astronomy, and the universe.
Stanza 3, or line 15, is an exact repetition of the statement in lines 1 and 2 except with the omission of “with me.” As a result of the omission, both clauses end with the word “heart” and form the parallel between “your heart” and “my heart.” The speaker, here, returns to the idea of union between the speaker and the beloved. This iteration of “i carry your heart” also holds a meaning quite different from that of the first—because the previous lines traveled to such great distances (to the treetops, to the moon, to the end of the universe), the speaker’s confession that they carry the beloved’s heart everywhere seems even more genuine.
