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Poetry Monday!: "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
"love is more thicker than forget / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail..."
Here's "love is more thicker than forget" (1939) by e.e. cummings (1894-1962):
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail…
For the rest of my "Sasha Reads" playlist, click here. Past poems are:
- "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- "The Pulley" by George Herbert
- "Harmonie du soir" by Charles Baudelaire
- "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
- "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova
- "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
- "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
- "Les Djinns" by Victor Hugo
- "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
- "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman
- "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") by Aleksandr Pushkin
- "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats
- "Je crains pas ça tellment" by Raymond Queneau
- "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot
- "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
- "Она" ("Ona", "She") by Zinaida Gippius
- "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
- "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
- "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz
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good old e. e. cummings, I'm reminded of one of his other poems:
don't call it a comeback, i been here for years
rocking my peers and putting suckas in fear
making the tears rain down like a monsoon
listen to the bass go boom
Didn't know ee was from the 'hood.
Imagine how great a poet he'd have been if he had only mastered grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. And maybe learned to actually rhyme, too.
Yes, I'm a philistine, or so I've been told.
Grammar is racist.
Seriously, poetry is literary beauty created within rules. It almost doesn't matter what the rules are, just so they're followed.
Call me unjaded if you must, but what ee Cummings did wasn't poetry. It just precisely wasn't poetry, deliberately.