Old Age Sticks (Criticism)

Criticism

Sean Robisch

Sean Robisch holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Purdue University and has taught composition and literature for eight years. In the following essay, Robisch explores the possible interpretations of “old age sticks,” by analyzing its unconventional language and syntax.

E. E. cummings is one of the best poets by whom to decide what in the world we mean when we say, “That is a poem.” He was able to alter a common notion of poetry — that its fundamental element is the word — by making poetry’s fundamental element the mark. One letter may act as the keyhole through which we might see a whole Cummings poem. A semicolon no longer merely serves the grammatical function of separating independent clauses or the elements of a list. It may instead be the leg of a grasshopper, a bird on a wire, or a semicolon that has chosen, as if on its own, to break its chains and show up when it is not welcome. This redefinition of the fundamental element of poetry is only part of cummings’s genius, but an important part, because with it he forged the poetry by which he is widely known, though often misrepresented.

Cummings was not the first to employ letters, punctuation, and spacing to create drama in a poem — Mina Loy was a famous predecessor — but he was probably the best. Today’s fashion of using punctuation marks in e-mail to horizontally indicate a smile [ :) ], or a wink [ ;) ], might be the subconscious offspring of cummings’s influence. In the absence of vocal communication, the marks on the page (or screen) substitute for what we gain in the speaker’s presence. This is the eternal dilemma of reading, the question of how we are to “hear” the (absent) author who wrote the words. The only way to consider many of cummings’s poems is visually, because to read one of them aloud, we would have to adopt some technique of representation. The comedian Victor Borga, when reading stories aloud during his performance, would make sounds to represent the punctuation marks, such as a “pop” noise to indicate a period. This presentation may create a funny way to hear a story, but whenever we “hear” the marks, we get the reader’s idea of how they might sound, rather than using our imaginations to account for what the marks on the page do. Few if any readers, though they might hear the words they read, invent sounds in their minds for the punctuation marks. We simply take the instruction (a period means the sentence is over) and continue on in the conventional methods of reading, often oblivious to the effect that a pair of parentheses or an ellipsis might have on us. In this way, cummings is “fun” to read, because his poems often invite a kind of decoding different from what we do with poetry we more easily recognize.

During the era of modernism a phenomenon known as “high modernism” developed, made famous by such poems as T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” in which lines from several languages, obscure literary and artistic references, and cultural critiques of complex political issues would appear throughout a usually long poem composed of several “movements,” like an orchestral arrangement. Many critics considered a poet to be growing in sophistication according to his or her command of these conventions. In other words, while the modern poets and critics from the 1910s to the 1950s often called for stylistic experimentation and challenges to the old notions of rhyme schemes and standard meters, they often wanted only a certain kind of experimentation. Cummings experimented in a manner that he had developed from earlier poets to become almost exclusively his own, and the critics of his work were sharply divided as to whether or not this was sufficient to make him a great poet.

His supporters, such as Marianne Moore and Allen Tate, saw in his work not only ingenious manipulations of sentences and words, but subtle commentary on his major subjects: love, spring, song, and childhood, which his poems celebrated; as well as war, blind loyalty, and sloganeering, which his poems regularly ridiculed. His detractors, such as R. P. Blackmur and John Crowe Ransom, saw cummings as sappy, too simplistic in his view of the complex issues of the world. To these critics, his love seemed too Pollyanna, his spring too easily victorious, and his depiction of childhood too idyllic to really address life with the complexity that great poetry demanded. As a result, cummings was considered a popular “college poet,” someone enjoyed early in one’s education, then disregarded after the alphabetic code had been broken like a cereal box toy and more sophisticated matters of literature taken up. Critics who adopted this view sometimes even poked fun of cummings, making up their own versions of oddly spaced, heavily punctuated, fragmentary poems that imitated his.

Cummings was not simply modern because he snapped some conventions, nor was he modernly simple because he missed the point that romantic love is often a painful experience. His achievements are built mostly on which conventions he chose to violate. His poetic style and view of the world combined in poems that were many years ahead of his critics. His lines come surprisingly, and they work language into something hard to describe. This is why one often has to approach cummings on the page rather than reading him aloud. The critic Norman Friedman has said, “Even when we know we like cummings, we lack the appropriate language for explaining why.”

Cummings did not shy away from the tough topics of poetry. “Old age sticks” is a fine example of this fact. In keeping with his paradoxical technique of both calling attention to himself and showing humility by signing his name in the lower case, cummings often employed the lower case in his poems as well. He did so for the disconcerting effects that are produced on form and content by the omission of capital letters. This also makes us feel that we’ve walked into the middle of something, that beginnings and endings are arbitrary, and that punctuation and capitalization are somehow inadequate to control something so overwhelming as time. If we read “old age sticks” as a treatment of aging, then the mythic connection of life and time is the heart of the poem, and hardly a trivial topic.

When we look at the table of contents for 95 Poems, the book in which “old age sticks” appears, we see the first line next to a number. Cummings did not title his poems, so the first line serves as an implicit title, because we lack the means of writing a table of contents any other way. The numbers (this poem is #57) are just as arbitrary. There is an order to the poems, but the numbers merely tell us when we have a new one, so that when we turn the page we know we aren’t reading the next section of the same poem. Cummings loved this kind of restriction in book reading, because it enabled him to point out to us just how linear our world of “calendars and clocks” (as he called it) really is. The first line as it appears in a table of contents, “old age sticks,” implies either that we are about to read

a poem about sticks — which is partly true if we consider the word a noun that refers to sticks that hold up signs — or that (taking “sticks” as a verb) old age “sticks to” something or someone, that it “sticks around,” that it exists forever. The time paradox dissolves (temporarily) when we turn the corner to the second line. Old age, now personified, is “sticking up” some signs. And here a new theme of the poem surfaces.

Now we see a struggle between old age — which is rule-making, sign-posting, and controlling — and youth — which is destructive and obstinate. And on this field cummings employs his play with word and mark to make a more subtle point. The first stanza ends with a closed parenthesis that has no opened half. Here’s a cummings puzzle. The mark could indicate that we’re in the middle of a parenthetical insertion into some other discussion, maybe an argument that’s been going on since before the poem began. It could be a mark designed to serve some other function than what a parenthesis normally does; if so, what? Maybe it functions, in accordance with the “old age” point of view, as a barrier of some kind, an obstacle. Or it could be simply replacing a period, since a period would indicate the end of something (i.e., the end of a “period”), and we can’t have that in a poem that plays with time. We might come up with a number of ways to see the parenthesis, and just as we decide which one to choose, cummings replaces the word “and” with the ampersand, a kind of trademark of his and a reminder of what cannot be represented by sound, but only inside our heads in the translation of a visual cue. As a result, we have to find a way to accommodate the odd use of punctuation and the replacement of a word by a symbol, at the same time.

So the struggle continues with the posting of “signs,” cues we read and are allowed to re-read with different meanings, which takes away the power of a sign telling us what to do. For instance, the “No Trespassing” sign that spans the second and third stanzas has something else written into it. By dividing “Trespass” and using the ampersand to both connect and separate the two parts of the word, we find that old age is educated and is admonishing youth in French as well as in English. “No,” the signposter says, then “Tres” (very) and “pas” (the negative, or “not”). So the sign also says, “No Very Not.” But youth doesn’t pay attention; it laughs at the strictness of old age, after yanking down the “Keep Off” signs, and while old age is “singing” negatives, youth does what it wants or so it thinks. This is where cummings delivers to us the complex emotional substance of the poem. “Goes on” implies the passage of time, and while youth thinks it is just going on about its business, the poet tells us that in fact the business of youth is to grow old. The passage of that time, which seems slow to youth but is all too quick for old age (which might be singing all those “stop” phrases against time itself), is indicated by the line break before the last line. Space in a cummings poem has much to do with time, and the physical act of growing, which youth might think of as a matter of space and height, is also a temporal matter, so he stretches it, lets it linger momentarily at the end of “gr” until the point is brought home. The last word of the poem is also the first, implying a cycle, the youth becoming the old age that will admonish the next youth.

In this way, cummings provides us with a game of serious stakes. He wasn’t merely playing when he wrote. His education and experiences were extensive, and his process of revision painstaking. Cummings would often explore, as mathematical permutations, the possible arrangements of the letters in a poem in order to test their effects. He drew inspiration for space and division from the great Cubist painters, and took up painting in order to use the white page as a place for shapes to do new work. When he deletes something, he calls us to see what would be there. When he trades one mark for another, he invites us to consider whether the trade was worth the effort. And when he asks us if we understand what a poem is, cummings may be asking if we are supposed to follow the rules of poetry and spit out easy definitions, or become poets ourselves and try to learn, both because of the rules and in spite of them, what wonderful things poetry can do.

Source: Sean Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky holds a Ph.D in English from Stony Brook University. His poems, stories, critical essays, and reviews appear regularly in literary journals. His collection of poetry, Death, But at a Good Price, received the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize for 1991 and was published by Story Line Press and the Nicholas Roerich Museum. In the following essay, Semansky explains how “old age sticks” “emphasizes the cyclical nature of time and the futility of our own attempts to stave off growing old.”

A painter as well as a poet, e. e. cummings was as interested in how a poem looks on the page as in how it sounds or what it means. His poetry consistently draws our attention to the fact that writing, in its material form, basically exists as ink in the shape of letters. These letters are then combined into units, or words, and the words are organized into phrases or sentences which give them meaning. A relentless experimenter, cummings would play with how words and sentences are assembled and arranged on the page to create new ways of expressing meaning. In so doing, he would blur the boundaries between “reading” and “viewing,” forcing his readers to visualize language — to recognize that writing dramatically illustrates the suturing of the visual and verbal. He would break words apart, coin new words by altering parts of speech, and be deliberately ungrammatical with syntax and punctuation in order to achieve these desired effects. For cummings, such tactics were poetic devices, much the same way that line, color, and lighting are painterly devices. In “old age sticks” cummings employs many of these innovations to visually enact the subject of the poem.

Cummings’s use of typographic innovations is partially drawn from the ideas informing Cubist painting, a popular artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques would analyze an image or object, break it down into its formal properties and then reconstruct it. For example, in Braques’ Man with a Guitar we see many straight lines, a very narrow range of color, and what looks like a figure sliced into geometric shapes. We learn nothing about the age, personality, or character of the “man” himself. Indeed, we can barely make out any such figure. Cubist poets such as cummings, Gertrude Stein, and Kenneth Rexroth tried to do in verse what Cubist painters such as Picasso and Braques were doing on canvas. They would take the elements of an image or idea (or rather, the word or words which represented that image or idea), divide them into parts, then reorganize them. This new synthesis often claimed to represent, by enacting, the increasing fragmentation of the modern world and the alienation from it that human beings experienced.

“Old age sticks” illustrates this visual and poetic technique. Consisting of five stanzas, the poem utilizes unconventional punctuation, fractured words, and a voice that sounds closer to a child’s than an adult’s to emphasize the cyclical nature of time and the futility of our own attempts to stave off growing old.

The first stanza begins simply enough with a personification of old age, that is, the idea of old age is acting like a human being and putting up signs that say “Keep Off.” Cummings capitalizes the two-word warning just as he capitalizes the words “Forbid,” “Must,” “Stop,” “Don’t,” and “No,” to emphasize the seriousness of the speaker’s tone. Similarly, cummings uses parentheses to underscore conflict between the generations. Grammatically, parentheses are a typographical device used to enclose words which add information or identification (for example, these words). The body of the sentence, so to speak, exists outside of them. Thomas Dilworth notes in an article in Explicatior that “the activity of old age appears within the confines of parentheses, suggesting repression, [while] the activity of youth is unbounded by parentheses, suggesting refusal to accept restrictions.” The subject or theme of cummings’s poem, then, is the assumptions that we as readers hold about what old age and youth truly want.

Youth’s “unboundedness” erupts in the central stanza in the middle of old age’s cry not to trespass. Sandwiched between “Tres)&(pas)” and “(sing,” “youth laughs” underscores youth’s scornful response to old age’s admonition to stay away, (showing its disrespect by making old age wait to finish its warning, “No Tres/pas/sing”). By placing “sing” so close to “laughs” however, cummings also shows how youth’s energy is strong enough to appropriate old age’s language. This interruption typifies (perhaps “stereotypifies”) youth’s impatience and rebelliousness against its elders. Breaking the word “trespassing” into three units also allows cummings to pun, albeit in French: “tres pas” translates as “very not,” a typical Cummingsism.

Old age’s increasing insistence in the fourth stanza builds into an almost pathetic last attempt to warn off youth. The staccato rhythm resulting from the words, which are broken but not hyphenated, and the devolution into one-word bleats enacts old age’s further deterioration, showing its fall into a kind of monosyllabic babytalk. This burst of blunt emotion occurs frequently in cummings’s poetry, as he distrusted tedious explanations, preferring instead direct and simple expression of feeling.

The final stanza asks us to reevaluate the entire poem. What we had thought was old age standing in opposition to youth we now see is old age siding with youth. “This reevaluation,” says Dilworth, “makes of the restrictions and denials of youth a warning against “gr/owing old” and suggests that old age has been on the side of youth all along.” Old age, however, is not warning youth not to become like it; it is warning youth not to think old. It is a hollow warning, of course, and therefore ironic. By this I mean that old age knows that youth will become just like it, regardless of its warnings. Cummings underscores this point by beginning and ending the poem with the same word — “old,” thereby drawing our attention to the cyclical nature of life itself.

The themes of aging and rebellion are common in cummings’s poetry. A romantic whose life was devoted to questioning the established typographic forms and traditions of poetry, cummings was nevertheless conventional in his subject matter, writing about love, nature, and aging in much of his poetry. Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair have written in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry that cummings was proud of his individualism. “It is in fact the badge he wears as a self-styled misfit, one still capable of feeling love and lust in an unfeeling, mechanized world,” they wrote. “He is revolting against people in high places, in crowded cities, in ruts ”.

Cummings captures the futility of resisting time’s onslaught by dramatizing the interaction between youth and old age. He does this in “old age sticks” by emphasizing process over product. Rather than showing us an image of an old person or a young person he concentrates on presenting the desires and behaviors of each generation (presented as abstractions) and putting them into (apparent) conflict. That we pay more attention to the way cummings presented his idea than the idea itself makes sense. “If a poet is anybody,” cummings said in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “he is somebody to whom things made matter very little — somebody who is obsessed by Making.”

As a poet of spontaneity and childlike wonder, cummings often explored optimistic themes in his poetry such as love and courtship, the processes of nature, and the celebration of simply being alive. In this way his poems are perhaps more accurately seen as belonging to the tradition of Romantic poetry, which prized the expression of an individual’s intense emotion and the celebration of the natural world, its rhythms and processes. It is his use of language, however, his treatment of it as a corporeal thing, that marks cummings as an innovator, as a truly modern poet. While critics have praised modern masters such as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost for their use of verbal ambiguity, myth, metaphysical wit, and a tragic vision of the modern world, they have not quite known what language to use to write about cummings, whose playfulness and often childlike vision of the world contrast the serious and solemn proclamations of his contemporaries. Cummings cannot be considered part of any school or movement. An iconoclast in poetry and in life, he opposed conformist attitudes and behavior. “Most-people,” he wrote, “have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootminusone. You and I are human beings, mostpeople are snobs.” Cummings echoes the apparent contradiction of this statement in “old age sticks,” as he would initially have us believe that old age and youth are in opposition to each other when, in fact, their destinies are similar: both are fated to play out the desires of the generational roles assigned them. They cannot act otherwise.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Two articles treat the importance of painting to cummings. First, Rushworth Kidder’s “cummings and Cubism: The Influence of the Visual Arts on cummings’ Early Poetry,” in Journal of Modern Literature 7 (April 1979): 255-91, is the best treatment of the relationship between his poetry and his painting, with many illustrations. Kidder’s “e. e. cummings: Painter,” in the Harvard Library Bulletin 23 (April 1975): 117-38, is a critical study of cummings’s whole career as a painter, with black-and-white illustrations.
• Also by Kidder, e. e. cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, 1979, provides accessible criticism for a first-time student of cummings.