poetry journal #3 (first poem)

“It may not always be so; and I say” by E.E. Cummings
Literary Critic

S: a man
O: when he thinks he is losing his loved one.
A: the woman he loves
P: to show her that his love for her is so great, that he would give away her love to another if she loved this other more than him.
S: losing the woman he loves so much.
Tone: melancholic, pure/real


In this poem the speaker is telling his loved one that he is willing to give up his love for her is she were to love someone else. It is as though he thinks that she will stop loving him or as he put it that “it might not always be so”. In the first stanza he talks about her lips kissing another, about her hair lying in another’s face. He also talks about her fingers clutching his own heart; here he paints a vivid picture of his broken heart. He hints to the excruciating pain he would feel if she were to love another.
In the first stanza, the author employs a constant pattern of ending rhyme. In the second stanza however, the end rhyme seems to be imperfect. This change also seems to be directly correlated with the turn the author takes in his message. Whereas before he talked about losing his loved one and how much this would pain him, in the second stanza he talks about his willingness to give her up. He tells her that he will take the other’s hand and willingly say “accept all happiness from me”. But it is not that he has also stopped loving her, but that he loves her so truly and purely that he would sacrifice his love for her if another will make her happier than he ever could. The loss of the melodic tone created by the ending rhyme patterns in the first stanza seems to symbolize the speakers’ loss of the one he loves. In the second stanza his words do not flow as smoothly, just as his heart is being torn apart and he “hear[s] one bird sing terribly afar in the lost lands”; just because he let her go it dose not mean that his heart does not ache with her absence. The authors’ use of ending rhyme an ending imperfect rhyme effectively conveys the intended message of his poem.