Stanza 1

Summary

In the first stanza Cummings describes two aspects of his love. Firstly, he depicts the effect of looking into her eyes. Secondly, he speaks about the impact of her delicate and fragile gestures. In both cases we have the impression that he is captivated by them or drawn into them.

Paraphrase

In a place where I have never been before, happily a long way from, anything I have ever experienced, your eyes don't have any noise.

I find within your most fragile expressive movements that there are things that envelope me,
or there are things that I cannot really have contact with because they are excessively close to me or perhaps too intimate.


Notes


By far the most difficult line in this poem is the opening line, and most of all the last phrase of that line: ...your eyes have their silence. It suggests that sound is generated in our minds by what we see and there is a very intimate place where this does not occur, 'where the eyes are quiet'.


The notion of visual stimuli being interpreted by the brain as sound is reminiscent of the medical condition of synaesthesia. This is due to cross-wiring between two specialised regions of the brain , one that deals with colour the other sound (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001). Ramachandran and Hubbard also talk about instances where visual stimulation can trigger sensations not known to have been prevously experienced. Here they allude to the ancient and ongoing philosophical debate about the mind being or not being a blank slate or tabla rasa. In this enigmatic first line of his poem Cummings may be referring to the same debate. For example, ...your eyes have their silence ...suggests the complete newness of his love. That is, he is experiencing something for which there is no precedent, or reference (cf Elaine Scarry's analysis of beauty as something that commands a search for a precedent). He seems to be saying that the visual information does not trigger any sound because no association exists. For the poet his love is an absolutely novel experience.


References


Ramachandran, V.S. & Hubbard, E.M (2001). Pyschophysical Investigations into the Neural Basis of Synaesthesia. Proceeding of the Royal Society of London. pp 979-984.


Scarry, E. On Beauty and Being Just (1999). Princeton University Press