Old Age Sticks (Themes)

Themes

Cycle of Life

One of the themes most common to the poetry of e. e. cummings is the natural process of life cycles. “Old age sticks” explores the aging process and the relationship of young and old by enacting a debate between “old age” and “youth.” We can paraphrase the debate this way: old age puts up signs that say “Keep Off,” but youth tears them down. In response, old age yells “No trespassing,” but youth just laughs. Old age shouts “Stop,” but youth continues. Reducing the poem in this way leaves out much of what makes it work as a poem, but it does help to clarify its essential debate structure.

Reduced in this fashion, old age appears as a force of restriction and repression, shouting a string of negatives: “No,” “Forbid/den,” “Stop,” “Must/n’t,” “Don’t.” Youth appears as a liberating and disruptive force, pulling down the signs, interrupting old age, and laughing. By enclosing or “confining” in parentheses the sections relating to old age, cummings emphasizes its repressive quality. Conversely, by placing the passages about youth outside the parentheses, cummings stresses its free or expressive quality.

The poem does not simply present a battle of “good” youth versus “bad” old age, however. Cummings complicates matters by showing the interdependency of the two sides. Graphically, old age and youth are intertwined on the page. Moreover, by the end of the poem youth is “growing old,” is itself turning into old age. In addition, the breaking of the word “growing” between two lines leaves youth “owing old” — youth is indebted to old age. A cycle is established in which youth ages, owing a debt to its elders and becoming “old age” to the next generation. Cummings employs several devices to underscore this continuity. The first and last words of the poem are “old,” suggesting that it ends where it begins and begins where it ends. Also, the last thing associated with old age is the ampersand and closing parenthesis — “&)” — in the fifth stanza. The ampersand is a symbol for “and.” And what? The business associated with old age seems unfinished, cut off. In the first stanza, however, the first thing we see associated with youth is “)&,” the mirror image of the closing of old age. Where old age ends, youth begins. Except for the ampersands and parentheses, old age dominates the first stanza and youth controls the last. Finally, the parenthesis in the fourth line of the first stanza, after “signs,” is a closing parenthesis; but we have not seen an opening one. This suggests that what is being concluded at the start of this poem began earlier, before the beginning of the poem — when the old age of this poem was youth to a previous generation.

What appears at first to be a battle between youth and old age in “old age sticks,” ends up as a dialectic, a synthesis of seeming opposites in a continuous cycle of life.

Language & Meaning

Word play and unusual spatial arrangement of words and symbols are two of cummings’s most significant contributions to modern poetry. Cummings drew and painted from an early age, and his poems often reflect his interest in visual representation of the world. Like a visual artist, he bent, broke, twisted, and reshaped the material of his poetic craft — language.

In “old age sticks” cummings flouts the conventions of language in various ways. He uses enjambment — the spilling over of one line onto the next — to create multiple meanings, as in “youth goes/right on/gr/owing old.” He capitalizes words contrary to the standard rules, as in this poem, where he uses capitals to emphasize each word in old age’s string of negative commands: “Keep / Off,” “No / Tres pas/sing,” “Forbid/den Stop / Must/n’t Don’t.” Parentheses are normally used to enclose supplemental or somewhat extraneous information that is not essential to the primary meaning of the sentence; in “old age sticks,” however, cummings uses parentheses to separate the passages relating to old age from those about youth. Both sets of information are essential to the meaning of the poem. Cummings also places or spaces words in highly unconventional ways, as when youth “interrupts” old age: “No / Tres)& (pas) / youth laughs / (sing.”

The presence of all these devices might be disorienting for a reader unused to such oddities, so cummings provides some aids to understanding the poem — he creates his own “rules.” For example, each of the five stanzas contains eight syllables arranged in four lines: 3-2-1-2. This arrangement gives the poem structure and a degree of predictability. Cummings consistently uses the ampersand (&) rather than the word “and.” Also, as we have seen, he is absolutely regular in the way he uses parentheses and capitals.

All the devices cummings employs add meaning to the poem, so that it conveys more than just the dictionary definitions of its words. In “old age sticks,” the words carry their usual meanings, but they also carry additional significance. The poem is about more than simply a battle between youth and old age. The interdependence of youth and old age and the theme of the cycle of life are entirely conveyed through cummings’ poetic devices. The words themselves say nothing about these subjects. Through the skillful selection, arrangement, and application of words, symbols, and techniques, Cummings is able to make “old age sticks” mean more than it says.