Read unusual grammar as a choice you can investigate. In E. E. Cummings’s [anyone lived in a pretty how town], the arrangement of ordinary words changes how people, actions and time come into view. Start with the printed page, then listen to the sentences.
Start with the job each word is doing
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
Possessives make the negative and affirmative verb forms behave like things a person can own. Read the balanced halves aloud. Grammar, sound and parallel action work together to give an unfamiliar construction a recognizable pattern.
Keep the complete poem and its line arrangement open. These small excerpts identify places to inspect; the surrounding stanza supplies the relationships.
Follow naming and recurrence
A word can become a person
noone loved him
The unusual spelling helps a common expression act like a name. Track who loves whom across the nearby stanzas. The words retain their everyday associations even as they acquire particular lives.
A repeated list makes a measure of time
sun moon stars rain
Recurring natural sequences frame human activity. Some return in changed order. Compare their positions and neighbors: recurrence can make continuity audible while lives change.
Parentheses, close-set words and stanza breaks also shape grouping. Preserve them when you quote. An interpretation should explain what a particular arrangement makes possible.
Annotate a stanza, then test your reading
Use a copy you can mark or a separate sheet of paper. Work on one stanza at a time; you can extend your reading once its local grammar makes sense.
- Find the actions. Underline verbs and identify the likely subject of each. When a word changes its usual grammatical role, write both possibilities in the margin.
- Mark the groups. Bracket phrases that seem to belong together. Compare your grouping with the printed punctuation and line endings.
- Read aloud twice. First pause at punctuation; then give line endings a slight pause. Record where the emphasis changes. The comparison reveals a choice for you to explain.
- Try a prose paraphrase. Write a plain sentence describing what seems to happen. Keep it beside the stanza as a working hypothesis.
- Identify what the paraphrase loses. Choose one ambiguity, sound pattern or repetition. Explain its contribution in a sentence that points to its location.
An original grammar experiment
Invented example: “Mara folded her perhaps.” The possessive and action encourage you to treat an uncertainty as an object. Compare “Mara was uncertain.” The ordinary sentence names a condition; the invented one gives it shape and handling. Use this experiment to ask a more exact question about a poet’s construction.
A useful reading can hold two grammatical possibilities open. State the evidence for each, then explain whether the larger stanza favors one or lets both continue. This produces a more informative note than replacing every unfamiliar construction with a single ordinary sentence.
Use the edition as part of the evidence
The Poetry Foundation credits its text to Complete Poems 1904–1962, edited by George J. Firmage, and identifies the magazine source as Poetry, August 1940. When citing, record the text you actually used and preserve capitalization, punctuation and line breaks.
Compare repetition and address in Beat writing, or use Roland Barthes and the work of interpretation to think about how a reading earns support from a text.
About these selections
Source notes identify the wording and edition used. Interpretations and exercises are Yenra’s. Follow the linked text when citing or comparing a passage.