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
This is wrong…..should be
“prurient philosophers”
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.
prurient philosophies pinched
Is this an alliteration?
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
Fans of this poem may also wish to check out, “Leaves of Grass,” by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), 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…”