The poem
O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting
fingers of prurient philosophies pinched and poked
thee has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy
beauty how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods but true
to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring
Fans of this poem may also wish to check out, "Leaves of Grass," by Walt Whitman ([phone removed]), for the similarly-themed, "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer." Another pair of complimentary poems by Cummings are right here in this collection: "Now i lay(with everywhere around)...," and, "Spring is like a perhaps hand..."
The answer to how things came to be is all around us...the earth is evidence in and of itself. We are bombarded with a million questions about existence and we want every one of them answered, yet if we look around us and simply enjoy the magic of what has been put there we would see that nature answers our questions. We want answers, physical evidence...we have failed to see what is already there and in do doing this we have also closed our minds to the inconceivable
prurient philosophies pinched
Is this an alliteration?
I find it interesting that cummings chose to describe the earth as "spontaneous" in the first line of the poem, and death as its "rhythmic lover". I would have thought that death was the more spontaneous of the two, and earth's rhythmic cycles are the very opposite of spontaneous.
O Sweet Spontaneous
This is wrong.....should be
"prurient philosophers"