Old Age Sticks

e. e. cummings 1958

Published in the collection 95 Poems, “old age sticks” exemplifies many of the unique typographic “quirks” typical of cummings’s verse, including absence of capital letters, irregular use of parentheses, and the use of the ampersand sign as a contraction for “and.” While these surface qualities are characteristic, cummings’s poetry also displays more complex poetic structures and qualities. “Old age sticks,” for example, which is made up of five four-line stanzas conforming to a set syllabic pattern (3-2-1-2), speaks to cummings’s broader interest in poetic form. It also offers an example of how cummings used enjambment to focus his readers’ attention on individual words — and in some cases word fragments. The poem also showcases the poet’s skill with thematic scope and tension. Using personification to introduce the subjects of the poem, “old age” and “youth,” cummings manages in forty syllables to encapsulate the inevitable process of aging and the human response to that process. While “old age” warns youth to slow down, not to be in such a rush to become an adult, “youth” dismisses the warning and speeds on its chosen path, heading toward old age and death. Ultimately, the poem communicates very succinctly this conflict from difference in perception.