Gillyboeuf, Theirry

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Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society Volume 8 Article 12 1999 The Symbol of Rain in Cummings' Poetry Theirry Gillyboeuf Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/spring_cummings Recommended Citation Gillyboeuf, Theirry (1999) "The Symbol of Rain in Cummings' Poetry," Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society: Vol. 8, Article 12. Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/spring_cummings/vol8/iss1/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact scholarworks@gvsu.edu. • THE SYMBOL OF RAIN IN CUMMINGS' POETRY Thierry Gillyboeuf In Eimi, when Cummings, leaving the U.S.S.R., is back in Paris, he exclaims : "I come in paradise and it's raining!" The irony of this sentence can lead one to mistake the meaning and worth Cummings attaches to rain . It's actually a joyful exclamation, the expression of a revival : Cummings leaves an unworld (U.S .S.R., an "altruistic game of human prisoners, a parody of ghostly circus which dares to call itself 'Russia"') to return to life (Paris) . Until then, in the poetic tradition of Paul Verlaine, rain embodied sadness, melancholy, and despair: Il pleure dans mon cceur Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur Qui penetre mon cceur ? With Cummings, however, things are wholly different. Rain is one of the truest expressions of cheerfulness, life, and love . The Cummingsian universe is different from mostpeople's. Instead of reasoning in terms of good/bad, right/wrong, beautiful/awful etc .... he feels in terms of curiosity, wonder and investigation . The result is the existence of two wholly separate universes: the living (dying) one and the unalive (undead) one - for: "unbeingdead isn't bein-galive" (CP 803). Unalive (undead) is a permanent condition, a strictly scien-tific, artificial, legal, ultra-sophisticated classification . On the con-trary, living (dying) is motion, invisible transformation, a change of condition - a reason why death is only a continuation, a natural extension of live both foreseeable and miraculous . At the end of his life, Cummings made the distinction between death - which is a condition - and dying - which is motion, a transition between life and afterwards. And "Rain comes; / predicating forever,assuming / the laughter of afterwards" (CP 357). And who is "Afterwards?" She's ON THE POETRY 87 a lady who likes flowers, just like the rain: "there's a lady, whose name is Afterwards / she is sitting beside young death,is slender; /likes flowers" (CP 189). Life, an old man "3 thirds / asleep" (189), car-ries those flowers on his head. Of course, for Cummings, rain belongs to this living uni-verse , just as the beloved, the poet himself, and the readers do, if they agree. It has the virtue of living (and, hence, of dying) from which come all its other natural attributes : presence, generosity, beauty, sensitivity, and wonder. It participates in life's natural cycle: birth, growing, fulfilment and death, where each disappearance is compensated for by an arrival. The face and colour of the world are thus altered. Cummings offers in his poems a response to what he calls "the mystery of growing" and feels an infinite joy for everything truly alive. This mystery can only be revealed by Nature. Whereas, according to Cummings, the man who understands and is sensitive to Nature will never lose his individuality nor his identity, since he's in touch with one of the more essential realities of life. Rain has certain symbolic similarities to sunset, snow, wind , flowers, dawn, leaves, children, April, Paris-all of which are con-stituent components of spring, which symbolizes life and growing , miracle and motion, love's spring . Cummings likes playing with the dual meaning of the word spring. The rain is spring's ambassadress - rain is also the dream of spring - which is a victory of disorder over order, of motion over stasis, where nothing is definitive where everything is birth. Rain announces and shall be revealed: "rain-drops need sunbeams or snowflakes make I possible mayflowers" (CP 577). In the pastoral tradition of Charles d'Orleans, Cummings seeks to re-produce spring's miracle, "omnipotent goddess" with hands of snow and fingers of rain : spring omnipotent goddess [ . .. ] your hands are the snow and thy fingers are the rain (CP 89) Spring comes unrecognized. Quite imperceptibly. Cummings: "poet 88 SPRING d • of eternal adolescence, of making, of unfinished" according to Denis Rigal, is particularly fond of this vitality. Noticing that poems which express this birth or this revival are more numerous in the poetry of Cummings' maturity, is revealing. Just like the character from one of his Fairy tales which grows younger as he comes down on earth, because he keeps asking "why," Cummings tries to approach the central mystery, to stand on the edge of indescribable. And rain can appear as a manifestation of early truth, of original secret : the gay innocence of birth: "Rain makes me feel happy as if I was just born easily and without any pain" (Canetti) . Whereas in poetic tradition rain is associated with autumn, in Cummings' poetry, it comes with April, which is the place where we are (CP 578). Let's notice however, that when, rain is associated with autumn, it finds again its "classical" attributes : loneliness, melancholy sadness, the poet's dereliction : dim nu tiv e this park is e mpty(everyb ody's elsewher e except me 6 e nglish sparrow s)a utumn & t he rai n th e raintherain (CP 696) April is season of love, as Paris is the city of love: "Paris is the only place where Spring really happens and brings love with it" (Aldington) . If in any other town Cummings sees the negation of the ON THE POETRY 89 individual, Paris personifies in his eyes the only place which achieves harmony, communion with mystery of life, integration to the universal strength which determins birth, growing, and death -[In Paris] I participated in an actual marriage of material with immaterial things; I celebrated an immediate reconciling of spirit and flesh, forever and now , heaven and earth . Paris was for me precisely and complexly this homogeneous duality: this accepting transcendence; this living and dying more than death or life . (nonlectures 53) this spiritual extension of life for those who answer to the phenom-enon of existence with love : Paris, April, and rain constitute the trinity of Cummingsesque Spring and love: "Paris;this April sunset [ .. . ) / the streets tum young with rain" (CP 183) or: or again: Take for example this: if to the colour of midnight to a more than darkness(which is myself and Paris and all things)the bright rain occurs deeply,beautifully (CP 182) rain fell( as it will in spring) (CP 86) For Cummings, beauty is in every natural scene, whether it's an urban or a pastoral one - and rain reconciles wonderfully those town and country aspirations : 90 ropes of silver gliding from sunny thunder into freshness SPRING • --and: as if god's flowers were pulling upon bells of gold (CP 86) the rain or rather Somebody who uses roofs and streets skilfully to make a possible and beautiful sound (CP 182) As well as for Verlaine, the music of rain is incantatory, but here it expresses a gay melancholy, rich with promises. It's a gift which, though awaited, hoped, remains a miracle : now comes the good rain farmers pray for[ ... ) (here is that rain awaited by leaves with all their trees and by forests with all their mountains) (CP 754) Since the poet is a creator of images, and since Cummings "is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement," rain is a visual element, this visual which expresses rhythm to catch the whole essence of an impression, an emotion . Don't forget that Cummings identifies himself as a painter and poet, and would have liked to live in China "where a painter is a poet." In his Ca!ligrammes, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire had wonder-fully represented the long strings of rain. Except one poem where Cummings represents rain which becomes a puddle when it touch-es the ground : he rai n th e raintherain (CP 696) Cummings chooses-since to him typography doesn't mere-ly represent but rather expresses--to restore the never-ending music ON THE POETRY 91 of rain. His poetry approached Debussy's music, who makes water and air converse in third part of La Mer. In many a poem, Cummings brings wind and rain together. Since they're precisely the most anonymous and mysteriously impersonal elements, the most fluid and amorphous, they are far from any anthropomor-phism. Cummings makes them really, deeply alive - just as Saint Francis of Assisi, he seems quite to exclaim with elation: "My Brother The Wind, My Sister The Rain." They embody this poetical leggerezza where everything is a tiny whisper, a trembling modesty. But beyond, their conversation is this, mightier, more earthly, more orig-inal, of ocean and hurricane. The wind is wholly fluid and its tur-bulence is disorder par excellence. It carries messages, shoves the clouds, stirs endlessly the essential clashing . It revives the ocean which it keeps undoing, disturbs without any respite the harmony which is always restored. The rain, as for it, is all liquidity. It is a flow without any shape for it is a billion of shapes : "the rain's /pearls singly-whispering" (CP 105). But this infinity of shapes composes a new unit, an individ-ual. One finds in this idea of multiplicity in one, the formula of love according to Cummings : lxl (one times one), where each of the individuals who compose the couple conserves his own individuali-ty while he wholly partakes of this new unity ("we" being always more than "you and me" [CP 782]). The rain is an individual com-posed of an infinite number of units-drops, of which each can express itself individually; it's similar to the beloved whose smile is composed of one thousand selves (CP 182). Rain is similar to the tree with all its leaves, another recurrent image in Cummings' poetry. Like the wind, rain is disorder, a disorder which doesn't respect what isn't : "Rain is no respecter of persons" (CP 329). Since they are creative and are a disorderly source of life, since they are elusive elements, since they convey a gay madness , wind and rain represent love, specifically the love of the poet and his beloved. And Cummings believes firmly in the power of love to change the world, for it can unite two incomplete persons and weld them into a perfect whole. The wind has "rich improbable hands" _to caress, embrace the "the rain's face" (CP 155). And if it blowns "the 92 SPRING rain away" (CP 153), it's the fiery Zeus raping lovely Europa. Sometimes, you possibly catch their amorous dialogue : Do you believe in always,the wind said to the rain I am too busy with my flowers to believe,the rain answered (CP 978) The wind, with its anxiety, clumsiness, ardour and strength is the poet himself, who tries to obtain from his beloved a promise for the future. But she is much too busy in taking good care of her flowers - the embodiment of intense beauty, fragile immortality of spring - to promise anything. The rain, precisely, is an expression both of the ephemeral and the eternal since, for Cummings, "april's day transcends november's year" (CP 765). -Actually, only the present is eternal, for it is where we live, where we love. Rain is timeless, but time is incapable of imagining or telling children, poets, and lovers anything (CP 817). The rain comes from nowhere, the elsewhere which is love's kingdom. It is the pre-eminence of feeling- the heart is infallible, infinite, and pos-itive - over thinking - mind is fallible, finite, and negative : sunlight is (life and day are)only loaned:whereas night is given(night and death and the rain are given;and given is how beautifully snow) (CP 816) With its silent arrival and its extraordinary vitality, the rain reveals "the intense fragility" of the beloved. It refers to her beauty. The immaterial body of the beloved, idealized by love, looks like the rain: " i have found what you are like / the rain" (CP 169). With more intensity, however, the lover feels: "you are [ . .. ] I like the rain I only sweeter frailer" (CP 294). He fears her inattention: "how much better / than me will you like the rain's face" (CP 155). Her eyes "smell of the sound of rain" (CP 424) and her hands are still more delicate: "nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands" (CP 367). ON THE POETRY 93 Being thus immaterialized and idealized, the beloved's body transcends the actuality of the love it embodies . It enriches this very universe where the poet dwells. It maintains the pre-eminence of feeling liberated from any mental category where the natural phe-nomenon is the illustration of a system of classification. It brings infinite joy, hope and faith . It celebrates the eternity of here and now. As in Botticelli's Venus Born from the Sea, the beloved's body arises from the rain . It marries the wind, its Shakespearian lover. The poetical utterance is nothing but a breath, an infinitesimal rumour which goes up from earth and down from sky in night's silence. Then, the rain aprils the poet. Danze, France WORKS CITED Aldington, Richard . As quoted by Lawrence Durrell in his foreword to Aldington's Dreams In the Luxembourg. Aries : Editions Acted Sud, 1986. Apollinaire, Guillaume. "II pleut," Calligrammes. Paris, 1918. Canetti, Elias. Die Fliegenepein . Zurich, 1992. Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Edited by George J. Firmage. NY: Liveright, 1996. ------. Eimi, Covici Friede, New York, 1933. ------ . i : six nonlectures, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1953. D . Jon Grossman, E.E. Cummings, Pierre Seghers editeur collection « Poetes d'aujourd'hui » , Paris, 1966. Riga!, Denis "La poesie de E.E. Cummings: une esthetique du movement." Sud. Marseille, 3e trimestre 1976. "The Old Man Who Said 'Why' ." Fairy Tales. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1965. Verlaine, Paul. Romances Sans Paroles, Sens 1874. 94 SPRI NG 

The Symbol of Rain in Cummings\u27 Poetry

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The Symbol of Rain in Cummings\u27 Poetry

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