A Summary and Analysis of E. E. Cummings’ ‘In Spite of Everything’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘In Spite of Everything’ (or, as the poet himself has it, without capitals, ‘in spite of everything’) is a short lyric poem by the American modernist poet E. E. Cummings (or, as he would himself have it, e. e. cummings). Cummings (1894-1962) was an innovative and distinctive poet famed for his lack of capital letters in his poetry and his idiosyncratic approach to punctuation.

This poem, which captures a brief moment in honour of love where the speaker of the poem kisses the pillow where he and his lover recently rested their heads as they slept together, demonstrates both of these qualities of Cummings’ verse.

Summary

This short poem is divided into two stanzas. In the first stanza, the poem’s speaker acknowledges that Doom, or destiny, will eventually erase all of our thoughts and memories when we die. This will happen in spite of the fact that there are so many living beings in the world: Doom, or Death (personified here with long white hands), will come for us all.

In the second stanza, the speaker responds to this fact. Since everything is temporary and death will erase it all, before he leaves his room after getting out of bed, the poem’s speaker tells us that he turns back towards the bed, and leans down to plant a kiss upon the pillow where he and his lover (‘dear’) recently rested their heads as they slept together in the bed.

Analysis

Cummings is well-known for writing love lyrics, and some of his best-known poems are about love, desire, and the intimate moments he has shared with a lover. Although the core meaning of his poetry sometimes verges on the sentimental (if it doesn’t fully teeter right over into full-blown sentimentality), the way he expresses these emotions is often unusual and arresting, given his innovative approach to form.

‘In Spite of Everything’ is a good example of how form helps to shape the meaning and effect of an E. E. Cummings poem. Take the syntax: the poem is one long sentence, although even then, it is not necessarily a full sentence, given that the poem begins (as is usual with a ‘cummings’ poem) without a capital letter (‘in’, not ‘In’).

This means that the first stanza spills over into the second: the run-on lines which are a feature of the poem also extend to the level of the stanzas, too. The dash which follows ‘our minds’ at the end of the first stanza is delayed until the start of the second stanza, allowing for an extra pause even before the formal pause (the blank line and the dash) come into play.

The central ‘action’ of the poem – the speaker kissing the pillow in memory of where he and his lover rested their heads – is actually preceded, not by one subordinate clause, but two: ‘in spite of …’ but also ‘since …’ There’s a twisting or contorting before we arrive at the main part of the poem’s one sentence: ‘in spite of’ the fact that life is everywhere, ‘Doom’ will still destroy it all, but ‘since’ Doom will come for everything, ‘i turn’: a sudden, brisk, brief action which turns the poem in a different direction, towards life and love and away from death and doom.

The briskness is magnified by the punctuation here: not ‘I turn, and’ but ‘i turn,and’. There is not even time to pause for breath, for a space between the comma and the conjunction. This suggests that the action is almost instinctive on the part of the speaker: performed out of some sudden impulse to stare down death with an affirmative act of devotion, rather than a carefully thought-out act.

Free Verse?

Is ‘In Spite of Everything’ a free verse poem? This is a more complex matter than it may first appear. Free verse is verse which lacks a regular metre and rhyme scheme, and often has irregular line lengths, as well.

Although ‘In Spite of Everything’ lacks a regular rhyme scheme, every single line in the poem finds a ‘match’ with another line. So although the line endings mostly lack full rhyme, there is plenty of pararhyme: ‘hands’ and ‘minds’, ‘crease’ and ‘kiss’, ‘dear’, and ‘were’, and even ‘everything’ and ‘stooping’. Indeed, there are numerous ‘-ing’ words in this short lyric, both nouns (‘everything’, ‘morning) and verbs (‘neatening’, ‘leaving’, ‘stooping’).

The one full rhyme, ‘Doom’ and ‘room’, neatly combines the two core elements of the poem: the idea of Death (the ‘white longest hands’) suggest the skeletal hands of the Grim Reaper) is kept at bay by the love, and lovemaking, that have been present in the speaker’s room. (The pronoun ‘my’ in ‘my room’ – as opposed to ‘our room’ – suggests that the lover may be a mistress or an occasional companion to the speaker, rather than a wife or regular partner.)

There is also plenty of assonance threaded through the poem: the long ‘e’ sounds of ‘breathes’, ‘neatening’, ‘crease’, ‘leaving’; and the long, cooing ‘oo’ sounds of ‘moves’, ‘Doom’, ‘smooth’, ‘room’, and ‘stooping’.

The Metre of the Poem

Similarly, the metre of Cummings’ poem is not as ‘free’ as it may first appear. There’s a general iambic pattern running throughout, although the poet doesn’t adhere to this religiously. But ‘in SPITE of EV-ery-THING’ is regular iambic trimeter, as is the second line.

In short, then, we may call the poem ‘free verse’, but only with several provisos. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but there is pararhyme (and one full end-rhyme) found in all lines; there is the ghost of an iambic trimeter pattern running through the poem, although there are numerous departures and variations.