Old Age Sticks

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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.

Author Biography

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, cummings spent his childhood in that city, where his father,

Edward Cummings, was a sociology professor at Harvard and a Unitarian clergyman. From an early age cummings showed a strong interest in poetry and art, which was encouraged by his mother Rebecca. Cummings attended Harvard University from 1911 to 1915 and joined the editorial board of the Harvard Monthly, a college literary magazine. While in college he became fascinated by avantgarde art, modernism, and cubism, and he began incorporating elements of these styles into his own poetry and paintings. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1915 and a master’s the following year. His first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets in 1917. These eight pieces feature the experimental verse forms and the lower-case personal pronoun “i” that were to become his trademark. The copyeditor of the book, however, mistook cummings’s intentions as typographical errors and made “corrections.” During World War I cummings volunteered for the French-based Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service. As a result of his disregard of regulations and his attempts to outwit the wartime censors in his letters home, cummings spent four months in an internment camp in Normandy on suspicion of treason. Although he found his detention amusing and even enjoyable, his father made use of his contacts in government to secure his son’s release. Cummings returned to New York and pursued painting but was drafted in 1918. He spent about a year at Camp Danvers, Massachusetts, during which time he wrote prolifically. Beginning around this time, cummings, with the knowledge and approval of his friend Schofield Thayer, had an affair with Schofield’s wife Elaine. Cummings’s daughter Nancy was born in 1919, but she was given Thayer’s name. Cummings and Elaine Thayer married in 1924, at which time cummings legally adopted Nancy. During the 1920s and 1930s he traveled widely in Europe, alternately living in Paris and New York, and developing parallel careers as a poet and a painter. He published his first poetry collection, Tulips and Chimneys, in 1923. Politically liberal with leftist leanings, cummings visited the Soviet Union in 1931 to learn about that government’s system of art subsidies. He was very disillusioned, however, by the regimentation and lack of personal and artistic freedom he encountered there. As a result, he abandoned his liberal views and became deeply conservative on social and political issues. Cummings continued to write steadily throughout the 1940s and 1950s, reaching his greatest popularity during this period and winning a number of honors, including the Shelley Memorial Award for poetry in 1944, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard for the academic year 1952-53, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1958. Despite such successes, however, he never achieved a steady income. Cummings continued to give poetry readings to college audiences across the United States until his death in 1962.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Line 1

This first line exemplifies cummings’s use of abrupt enjambment to create fragmentary or partial thoughts that, while part of a larger phrase or idea, also stand alone. In this case, if one were reading quickly it would be easy read or hear “old age stinks” by accident. The misreading would hint at a disdain for old age. In this manner the line sets the tone of the poem. The broken line also interrupts a larger phrase, leaving the careful reader asking what “old age” sticks—or with what or how. It also obscures the grammar of the sentence, so that “sticks” might appear to be a noun rather than a verb and “old age” might appear to be an adjective rather than a noun.

Line 2

This line is a bit baffling. By breaking lines this way, cummings makes his reader pay attention to the individual words he uses, inviting a consideration of their various associations. Here, through a process of random association, the words “up” and “keep” are easily contracted into “upkeep.” One might also think of “keeping up,” as in to “keep up” with the times, with other people, or with life. Ultimately, these associations all build toward the tension of the poem’s overall theme: in some sense the poem comments on both “upkeep” (maintenance) and “keeping up” (competition).

Lines 3-4

These lines bring a partial conclusion to the thought begun in line 1. All of the syntactic clues provided in the preceding lines suddenly add up to something. The reader learns that “old age sticks up ‘keep off’ signs.” Consequently, these four lines also portray “old age” as forbidding, trying to limit individual actions and deem what is acceptable. Note that the speaker of the poem speaks of “old age” as if it were a person: through this personification the speaker makes clear that he is not simply saying that “old people” do these things, but that age does these things. Thus, the focus of the poem is the abstract idea of “age” and “aging.”

Lines 5-8

The focus of the poem shifts momentarily to “youth,” also personified. “Youth” and “old age” are set in direct opposition to one another: “old age” plants warnings, and “youth” yanks them up. The lines imply that “youth” refuses to abide by “old age”’s edicts.

Media Adaptations

A cassette titled e. e. cummings Reads, in which cummings reads from his dramatic and poetic works, was released by Caedmon in 1956.
A two-cassette set titled e. e. cummings Reads His Collected Poetry, 1943-58 is available from Caedmon.

Line 9

This line finishes the thought begun in line 8. In this manner the thought is enjambed from stanza 2 to stanza 3. The reader begins to see that “old age” wants “youth” to “back off,” to “not trespass” on “old age”’s territory. It’s not clear, however, exactly what territory this is that “old age” is trying to protect. Note again the typographic irregularity or uniqueness of this line. Cummings uses parentheses to break up the word “trespass” into “Tres) & (pas).” He also drops the second “s” off the word “pass,” effectively drawing more attention to it through these oddities. The reader is likely to realize that, had the poet left the “s” on, then the parentheses would contain the word “pass.” It is possible that this actually draws attention to the word “pass,” which may suggest a larger theme that the poem is developing.

Line 10

In this line, the nature of the conflict between “old age” and “youth” becomes much more clear. “Youth laughs” suggests that “youth” feels in no way threatened by “old age.” Rather, it would seem “old age” somehow seems threatened by “youth.”

Lines 11-12

Technically speaking, this is an example of a “mixed” sentence construction, which means that the subject of the sentence is not apparent. On the one hand we might read this as a quote in which “youth” commands “old age” to “sing.” On the other hand, the poem makes more sense when we read this in terms of what follows and read “old age / scolds” “youth.” Or we might take this to mean that “old age” is commanding “youth” to “sing”: “‘Sing,’ old age scolds.” Such ambiguity is common to modern poetry and should be looked upon less as a problem than as an “opening” that allows many meanings to coexist.

Lines 13-16

In these lines, “old age” again tries to dictate what “youth” will do, but notice that by breaking words apart, the poem takes on an almost pathetic tone. Each break creates a pause suggestive of an inability to speak, which in its turn suggests an overwhelming emotion.

Lines 17-20

This last stanza brings the poem to its conclusion. “Old age” has been trying to keep youth from “gr/owing old.” The reason, implicitly, is that if “youth” grows old, if “youth” trespasses into “old age”’s territory, then there is nowhere left for “old age” to go, other than death. At the same time, however, it would seem “old age” has not so much been trying to “command” or dictate what “youth” can do, but rather to warn “youth.” In a sense, “old age” appears less self-serving than helpful. The irony is that youth’s trespass and rebellion, its desire to mature and grow, are speeding it on toward the same fate as “old age.” It is this cycle of aging, as well as the social cycle of distrust between generations, that the poem gradually reveals in form as well as content.

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.

Style

“Old age sticks” is written in free verse, which means it follows no set pattern of rhyme or meter. The poem does have, however, a set syllabic construction. Each stanza is made up of four lines: each first line has three syllables; each second, two syllables; each third, one syllable; each fourth, two

Topics for Further Study

Write a simple, honest statement about the different attitudes of young and old people. Put your statement into a poetic form like cummings’s poem, breaking words onto different lines and even different stanzas. The result should be a poem that makes readers stop and wonder about your basic truth, instead of accepting it too easily without thought.
What does the first line tell you about the theme of the poem? What does the last line tell you? Do you think word manipulation is an effective tool for getting these ideas across?

syllables. Ultimately the pattern is circular and repeating. This structure suggests a reflection of the poem’s content, which demonstrates how “old age” is replaced by a “youth” that becomes an “old age” that is replaced by a younger “youth” and so on. When form and content mirror each other in such a manner, the result is sometimes termed organic composition. Cummings also uses enjambment—sentences that run over line endings—to reinforce his meanings. For example, in the first line of the poem, cummings breaks the line mid-thought, leaving the reader in suspense for the completion of the thought. We are left with the question: “old age sticks what?” Enjambment also compels readers to try to make meaning of fragmented or disjointed thoughts, with the effect that readers try to process associative meanings—the various connotations of the individual words. When this technique is well employed, such associations contribute to the overall meaning of the poem.

Finally, another noteworthy poetic device in “old age sticks” is its use of personification. Both “old age” and “youth,” essentially abstract ideas, are personified in the poem, which is to say that they are given human qualities. In effect this allows the poem to speak not only about the abstract ideas of “youth” and “old age” but also to the particulars of human experience in response to aging.

Historical Context

There is a common, stereotypical view of America in the 1950s as complacent, conformist, and staunchly anticommunist. The decade saw the rise of television, tract housing, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate hearings on the supposed infiltration of the United States by communists. In the years following World War II, two world powers emerged as “superpowers,” both possessing nuclear weapons: the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet domination and control of eastern European countries behind an “iron curtain” led to widespread fear among Americans. This was the birth of the Cold War, an atmosphere of hostility and aggression between the West (America and its allies) and the East (the Soviet Union and its allies), similar to that of wartime but without outright military conflict.

The two superpowers never directly confronted each other in battle, but their support of opposing sides in conflicts around the world gave a global scale to their antagonism. The decade of the 1950s opened with the Korean War—in which communist forces in the north of the country tried to overtake the republican south—and it ended with Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba. The decade also witnessed the start of the “space race” when, in 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite. The U.S. responded with its own satellite the following year. The whole world, it seemed, was too small a battlefield for the Cold War; outer space itself was disputed territory.

In the common view of the 1950s, the period is characterized by the tension and suspicion of the Cold War. In such threatening conditions, absolute obedience was required of Americans if their country were to prevail. Dissent, protest, and nonconformity seemed disloyal, “un-American.” This is the stereotypical view of the 1950s. While it contains elements of truth, the reality was much more complicated. The period was one of significant political, social, and cultural change. The references we have made to the development of nuclear power, the space program, and television point to some of the technological and scientific advances of the time. In medicine, a vaccine for polio was developed, as was the model of the DNA molecule. The decade also saw the rise of the civil rights movement. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional; the following year, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others staged the Montgomery bus boycott, bringing about the desegregation of the public transportation in that city. In 1956 buses throughout America were desegregated as a result of a Supreme Court ruling. In the arts, abstract expressionism rejected literal representation in painting; the be-bop style evolved in jazz, stressing spontaneity and improvisation; and the Beat writers championed freedom and the stream-of-consciousness mode of writing. Of course, rock and roll—by definition an expression of rebellion—was born in the 1950s.

It was during this time of surface conformity masking an underlying ferment that “old age sticks” was published. 95 poems, the collection containing “old age sticks,” was released in 1958, when cummings was sixty-four. At that age, cummings would seem a likely representative of an older, conservative generation at odds with the forces of change. And, at first glance, “old age sticks” does seem to depict an unresolved and unresolvable opposition between generations, between representatives of orderly stability and disorderly change. But on closer inspection we can see that the poem blurs the distinctions between the two groups and provides a complex view of life as a cycle in which there is continuity but also constant change. In this way “old age sticks” seems an apt expression of the times in which it was written.

Critical Overview

“Old age sticks” displays many of the poetic innovations that distinguish cummings’s verse, including the absence of capital letters, abrupt enjambment, and irregular use of punctuation. Since so much of this defies the rules typical of poetry before the twentieth century, critics have searched for some source and meaning for cummings’s inventiveness. The relationship of cummings’s unique visual arrangements of words on the page to his work as a painter has provided scholars with a good deal of useful evidence. In his book e. e. cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, Rushworth Kidder comments, “poetry and visual art grew, in cummings’ mind, from one root; and while their outermost branches are distinct enough, there are many places closer to the trunk where it is hard to know which impulse accounts for a piece of work.” Playing with spelling, grammar, line-breaks, punctuation, and rhyme allowed cummings many levels of ambiguity, many subtleties of meaning in a seemingly simple verse. Milton Cohen writes of such

Compare & Contrast

1958: Moroccan women gain the right to choose their own husbands. The government in the capital, Rabat, restricts polygamy in the country.
Today: In Egypt, after a long debate between Islamic fundamentalists and human rights activists, a national ban is passed protecting women from female circumcision.
1958: The first Grammy Award is given to the Italian song “Volare,” but the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is criticized for favoring older, more conservative, middle-of-the-road artists over youth-oriented performers.
Today: The 1997 Grammy Award for Best Album goes to Beck Hansen’s Odelay! An eclectic blend of styles from the past and unique lyrics, Beck’s distinctive sound appeals to a young audience.
1958: The Earth’s radiation shield of ozone is first tested in an effort to discover what effects have been caused by nuclear weapons testing and high-altitude military and commercial flights. Ozone is an unstable form of oxygen that blocks the Earth from ultraviolet radiation, the cause of human skin cancer. By the 1970s, the ozone layer begins to shrink as a million tons of freon are released into the atmosphere, mostly from aerosol cans.
Today: Environmentalists suggest that the ozone layer is being depleted. Medical experts suggest that fair-skinned people wear sun-block protectants whenever they are outdoors.
1958: Fidel Castro, 32, rides the wake of dictator Fulgencio Bastista’s abdication of Cuba’s leadership. Castro and his Marxist forces overtake the capital Havana on January 3 of the following year, beginning their regime, which he insists is not “communist.”
1997: Castro’s “humanistic revolution” is considered a failure. Freedom of religion is returned to the country that receives a visit from Pope John Paul II.

ambiguities in his article “e. e. cummings’ Sleight of Hand: Perceptual Ambiguity in His Early Poetry, Painting and Career” for University of Hartford Studies in Literature. He suggests that, while these ambiguities are often regarded as “structural,” they are actually essentially “perceptual.” He explains that “they control the speed and manner in which a line is perceived.” Cohen argues further that, “Typically, the reader perceives a thematic motif and expects its progression, only to have an ambiguous swing word lead to quite a different meaning. Momentarily thrown off by the unexpected turn, the reader must accommodate the new idea, either by reconciling it with the original, or by maintaining both in suspension.” According to this critic, then, cummings’s poetry not only ties meaning to form, but the form even compels the reader to perceive more than one potential meaning at once.

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

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.

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

“Critics … sometimes even poked fun of cummings, making up their own versions of oddly spaced, heavily punctuated, fragmentary poems that imitated his.”

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.

“What we had thought was old age standing in opposition to youth we now see is old age siding with youth.”

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.

Rushworth M. Kidder

In the following excerpt, Kidder disproves some common fallacies about e. e. cummings, revaluates some criticism of his poetry, and provides “general rules for paraphrasing” his poems.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

“Cummings wrote—it will not do to mince words—some bad poetry. Moreover, he occasionally published it.… He seemed unwilling to consider the wastebasket his ally.”

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Source: Introduction to e. e. cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 1-15.

Sources

Cohen, Milton E., “e. e. cummings’ Sleight of Hand: Perceptual Ambiguity in His Early Poetry, Painting and Career” in University of Hartford Studies in Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1983, pp. 33-46.

cummings, e. e., 95 Poems, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1958.

cummings, e. e., Poems: 1923-1954, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968.

Dilworth, Thomas, “e. e. cummings’ ‘old age sticks,’” The Explicator, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1995, pp. 32-3.

Fairley, Irene R., e. e. cummings and Ungrammar, New York: Watermill Publishers, 1975.

Friedman, Norman, ed., e. e. cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972.

Friedman, Norman, e. e. cummings: The Art of His Poetry, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960.

Friedman, Norman, “e. e. cummings and His Critics,” Criticism, Vol. 6, 1964, pp. 114-33.

Kennedy, Richard S., e. e. cummings Revisited, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Kidder, Rushworth, “Cummings and Cubism: The Influence of the Visual Arts on Cummings’ Early Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 7, April, 1979, pp. 255-91.

Kidder, Rushworth, e. e. cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1979.

Lane, Gary, I Am: A Study of e. e. cummings’ Poems, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1976.

Norman, Charles, e. e. cummings the Magic-Maker, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958.

O’Clair, Robert, and Richard Ellmann, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, New York: Norton, 1988.