[love is more thicker than forget]

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1939

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Sea

The speaker uses powerful symbols drawn from nature to help create the definition of love. For the speaker, nature is reassuringly present. It is available as teacher to anyone whose senses are alert to its beauty, whose heart is attuned to its richness, and whose soul is open to its meaning. Because the poem seeks to define an abstract, using the sea as a frame of symbolic reference helps clarify the insights the speaker wants to share.

Love, the speaker argues, is immediate, as present, as available as the sea itself, keeping in mind the planet is some 75% water. The sea thus suggests that love is not some rare and special event—it is here, there, all around. In the first stanza, the poem assures that love is as frequent as “a wave is wet” (Line 3). The metaphor sets up a relationship that celebrates the sheer availability of love, how easy it is to fall under its tonic spell.

Later, the speaker again draws on the symbol of the sea to suggest that love is as a well: deep, emotionally and spiritually complex. Love cannot die, cannot vanish. Much like the sea, it resists being un-being. In suggesting the sea is deeper than the sea itself, the speaker uses the sea as symbol of emotional depth, how love, like the sea, has a bright and playful surface but extends into uncharted and unexplored depths. In observing the sea below the sea, the speaker draws on the concept of the physical world yielding to a transcendent world beyond the reach and measure of the senses. Like the sea, love is both there, that is measurable and observable, and yet not-there, sustaining a complex of deep emotional realities, an often dizzying (even terrifying) contradiction.

The Moon and the Sun

The speaker uses both the moon and the sun to indicate symbolically how love itself is full of contradictions, how it can be one thing and its opposite at the same time. That logic resists the entire premise of logic, which seeks to untangle mysteries and trace back to clear answers. Rather than treating love like a math problem that needs to be solved, Cummings delights in offering a conundrum using both the sun and the moon.

After all, the sun and moon are complementary heavenly bodies, not competing. Both celestial bodies inhabit the sky, often at the same time, creating a wonderful (and in its own way beautiful) paradox, two mutually exclusive realities maintained at the same time.

Thus, love is “moonly” (Line 5), with its suggestion of “madness,” a surrender to unpredictable, even uncontrollable behavior. Indeed, the root of the word “lunatic” comes from the Latin word for moon. In this observation (using a word, appropriately, that the speaker invents) the speaker suggests the eccentric, unpredictable, utterly illogical behavior that can be justified and sustained by the experience of falling in love. Eight lines later, however, the speaker assures that, yes, falling in love is moonly, it does abide and sustain eccentric behaviors, but it is also “sunly” (Line 13). Sun suggests clear sight, reliable behavior, constant and consistent. Unlike the shadowy, mysterious world of moonlight, sunlight floods the world with light sufficient to operate calmly, cleanly, helpfully, predictably. The moon suggests unpredictability and mystery; the sun suggests clarity and logic. A traditional love poem tends to argue one or the other or suggests one is the problem, the other a solution. Here the poem resists such tidiness. Love is both insanity and sanity, illogic and logic, mystery and clarity.

The Sky

Love cannot die, we are told, any more than the sky higher than the sky can. In the closing lines, the speaker uses the symbol of the sky higher than the sky to suggest the transcendent nature of love. Those who so casually fall in and then out of love never glimpse the sheer power of the emotion. Yes, individual experiences often fail, collapse, fade, even hiss away into silence and loneliness. Certainly, the sky changes, but above, higher, grander than the sky above is the transcendent concept of Sky, which does not come and go, does not fade, but rather provides a stable and identifying absolute. Cummings understands that, for his readers, love can get confused with lust or conflated with economic considerations, defined by logic or driven by the animal hunger.

In using the symbol of a sky higher than the sky, the speaker suggests that love is immediate and available. It is as present and as wide as the sky. That love is certainly important in its own limited way. The poem uses the sky higher than the sky to suggest that the love a person feels is animated by a cosmic-wide energy that is love, or more precisely love with a capital L. The speaker says this without apology, despite the difficulty some have in accepting that emotions are manifestations of wider, deeper, higher energies. Love matters not because you fall in love but because love is there, everywhere, and in falling in love you tap into that wider and higher energy that, in the end, elevates the species. We do not fall in love like animals who mate only because a species will not accept its own extinction. Something higher, finer, grander animates love. This is the only supranatural element in a poem otherwise committed to and bound to the real-time world. That element, however, demands a most profound leap of faith.