Journal #3 (2nd poem)

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)” by E.E Cummings
Personal Response

S: a man in love
O: declaring his love to the woman of his life
A: the woman he loves
P: To show her how much she truly means to him
S: his love
Tone: romantic

In this poem the speaker talks of the love he feels for a woman and how it has become like a part of him; in everything he does, in everything he feels she is always present. Yet her presence is not haunting, for she is who brightens his life. This poem is very unusual in that it utilizes parenthesis all throughout. As I was reading, I noticed that the parenthesis where like symbols that encompassed what it meant for the speaker to carry her heart in his. For instance, in the second stanza he talks about fearing no faith, but in parenthesis he says that it is because she is his faith. He also says that he wants no world, but in parenthesis he says that it is because she is his world. The great love he feels for her has embedded her deeply in his heart, just as the parenthesis symbolically enclose the words that tell what she means to him. This poem is truly one of my favorites. The way in which the speaker describes the love for her is very unique yet very powerful. He describes his love as something that “grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide”. It is as though the love they feel for each other has made them one single soul; one breathes for the other and what love is truer than that! Love is such a complex feeling that not a lot of people can explain. But the way the speaker describes it in this poem, enclosing words like treasures that are kept only between the reader and speaker, resonates to what all of us have felt for another at some point in time. I too sometimes feel like I carry other people’s heart in my heart, for they too become my everything.