Love
What makes “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” a unique love poem is that it not only celebrates a romantic relationship between two individuals, but also expands into a contemplation of more complex concepts like life, being, and the metaphysical. The speaker treats love like a physical object that can be contained, carried, and transferred; on the other hand, the speaker also treats love as both the foundation and end of human existence. The poem breaks physical and conceptual boundaries to illuminate the various aspects of love. Of course, it is also a sweet love poem that one may want to recite to one’s loved one on Valentine’s Day.
Space and Scale
Moving from a metaphorical human thorax, to the sun and the moon, to the stars, and back, the speaker of this poem quite radically traverses spatial boundaries. The speaker’s affection seems to be grounded in spatial constructs—such as concepts like “everywhere” and “here”—and the scale of their love is expressed in terms of its ubiquity. The speaker expresses the broad scale of their love by taking the poem into outer space and even the extremities of the universe. On the other hand, the poem also refers to notions on a much smaller scale: “secrets,” and the individual “soul” and “mind.” Cummings explores the world of the miniature in this poem, by using the typographic elements of parentheses and the lowercased “i.” From the very private to the universal, this poem bravely explores different notions of space and scale.
Ideas and Truths
This poem explores thoughts, secrets, observations, and generalizations. Even love itself is, in a sense, an opinion one individual holds about another. By referring to their lover as “my true,” the speaker treats the addressee of this poem as an absolute verity, and does not even constrict them within the noun form, “truth.” The poem is full of generalizations, qualifications, and superlatives (“never,” “anywhere,” “whatever,” “only,” “no fate,” “no world,” “always,” “deepest,” “nobody”). The speaker’s expressions of love also sound like astronomical and botanical hypotheses that make certain arguments about natural phenomena. Thus, the poem as a whole is a philosophical process through which the speaker, by means of love, seeks the imperishable truths of the universe.
