E.E. Cummings, "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls"

Poem found here.

 

First lines:

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

 

the proof is in the reading

 

My intent here is simply to give a reading of a poem, and speak the poem's qualities through that reading. The poem in question is E.E. Cummings's well known "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls," from his first collection Tulips and Chimneys (1923). The choice is not unmotivated. An online friend of mine sent me a link to an established booktuber offering first an intentionally mangled oral reading of the poem followed by an intentionally close-minded ideational reading. I am not sure what choir he was preaching to but it made me half irritated and half embarrassed for the guy. So in the spirit of the defense of the realm, let's give a reading.

It is short, so read it a couple times to get the feel of it. Some quick notes toward that end:

First, what you would know from it published in his book (or in his collected), Cummings calls it a sonnet, and while it may not be consistently pentametric, I do read it as iambic, and it does have a rhyme scheme: abcddcbaefggfe. I consider rhyme scheme to be the the dominant element to legitimately calling something a sonnet. Fourteen lines of blank verse is rather easy, but I've seen it done to remark. And if not even that then why use the word? Who are you trying to con? Yourself? I have said it before I think Cummings is the U.S.'s supreme sonneteer. It would be an interesting book to publish just his sonnets to see their evolution. It would be an interesting book because he does them so well.

Second, this poem is early on in Cummings's career, so the typographical play is not yet that severe. You should be able to read it without much difficulty. Let the line ends help; and, with all of Cummings verse, pay attention more to syntax and semantics than to punctuation. The one difficult spot may be the periods in line 11. I read that as a pause: for me, the sentence that begins with "While permanent faces" continues all the way through to the end of the poem, with a little pause at the string of periods. It can also be read that the periods end the sentence prematurely and starts a new thought. I tend to read it as one long thought, keeping with the sonnet idea that the second part of the verse holds a thought of its own. (To note, the Poetry Foundation site errs in its presentation of the periods. There should be spaces between them.)

Third, recognize that the point of the verse is to disparage the Cambridge ladies. Do not try to read it against the grain. The booktuber could not seem to handle that someone would speak ill of the fair citizens of Cambridge, as though all verse must be complimentary. But, then, he was dredging for ways to speak ill of the poem. (If he can't understand this only slightly difficult poem, he really should not be talking about verse at all.)

That said, give it a couple reads, and we will start.

The first two lines

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

set the scene. It speaks about the Cambridge ladies in broad terms, telling who they are with three well chosen phrases. They "live in furnished souls": souls that already come with furnishing, souls that they do not themselves decorate, souls that are nice but do not stand out one way or another, souls that are fitting to people who do not want to decorate, souls no one would object to. They are "unbeautiful": notice he does not say ugly, or plain, he says "unbeautiful." What they are he will not say, but no one would ever call them beautiful. And they "have comfortable minds": minds that never stir and are never stirred, minds that exist in perpetual ease. And there in three brush strokes we have the Cambridge ladies, unexceptional and unpossessing – if even that – in soul, body, and mind. What follows is commentary.

Lines 3 and 4 are presented as a parenthetical, but they are quite damning.

(also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)

The Cambridge ladies have daughters, and have them with "the church's protestant blessings." Notice "protestant" modifies blessings, not church, so it is not merely a label of denomination. It tells what the blessings are like: protestant, as in lacking the finery and ritual and performance of the Catholic or Anglican church, as in being blessings that are themselves furnished, unbeautiful, and comfortable. And by those blessings they have daughters that are, appropriately, "unscented shapeless spirited." By "spirited" I believe you should read "of the nature of a spirit"; that is, lacking in corporeality, and, by implication of the line, sensuality. Why I call this damning is it is showing how the lack that defines the Cambridge ladies is passed on to their daughters. It is not merely a clique; it runs deeper, across generations. They condemn their offspring to likewise furnished souls. Indeed, they hardly can be said to have daughters.

Line 5 goes back to the Cambridge ladies.

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

Something of a joke, here. If you don't know, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was a very popular versifier in his time. Probably his most famous piece is "The Song of Hiawatha" which was published in 1855. But he was a populist versifier. He wrote for J. Q. Public and his skill did not exceed that. No one today speaks of him in terms of literary brilliance. So that Christ and Longfellow are tethered together in the line speaks also of how the Cambridge ladies think of Christ. Thus the joke. "Both dead" can be read twofold. First, within the context of the line – "They believe in . . . both dead" – it speaks that the scope of what the Cambridge ladies believe in lies within the dead in the sense of not being alive. They do not believe in anything current, anyone presently breathing. Second it speaks, more directly, that Longfellow and Christ are dead, which can be read as spiritually dead. There is the phrase "the living Christ," and we can speak of "living" literature. Neither of those apply to the Cambridge ladies.

Line 6 to the first word of line 9 is one thought.

are invariably interested in so many things— at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps.

Line 6 sets up the thought. They are interested in "so many things" – in context this is easily read as lack rather than substance: they are a little bit interested in so many things, but not exceedingly interested in anything. They dance around their interests, flitting from one to the next. And it is "invariably" so, this state. "At the present" they are knitting things to be donated. But that question mark that closes line 8 fits in with what was already set up – as they flit about from interest to interest they are hardly interested enough to keep track. So "perhaps" whom they are presently knitting for are the Poles. It is not that they are not sure, it is that it never bothers them enough to really care. Which speaks about the nature of their charity work: it is just something they do in their comfortable minds. They are never deeply moved by the plight of the people for whom they are knitting; it is just this moment's charity – charity du jour, as it were.

The rest of line 9 to the end of the poem is, for me, one long thought (as discussed above).

While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D . . . . the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

"Permanent faces" should be by now expected, as the Cambridge ladies pass unmoved through life. And they talk of the scandal "coyly" – modestly, but also affectedly. They are not deeply moved by the scandal but among themselves put up a little show. Perhaps what they oppose most about it is that it disrupts their comfortable lives; perhaps they disapprove that it is itself something un-comfortable; something living. And then we have that little pause, something that gives a touch of emphasis to the gossiping, and then the thought (and sentence) picks back up and the poem rises to its climax. "Lavender and cornerless" is a wonderful description of the "box" of the sky, and of the kind of sky Cummings is hoping you to read – which is to say the kind of sky the Cambridge ladies are unmoved by. It is a metaphor – the box of the sky – that would not catch the fancy of the Cambridge ladies. Which is the point of those last four lines: they are unmoved by the sky, just as they are unmoved by the moon, an object that is tethered to myth, beauty, and mystery; the moon which sits in its box like a piece of candy, something delightful and poetically delectable; but, then, an object which does not sit but "rattles" in anger at the furnished souls of the Cambridge ladies, at their tittering about a romance that would be the very thing the moon would have a hand in, at their lack of concern for life, at their refusal to look up and see.

Thus the Cambridge ladies. But more importantly, thus the poem. Cummings did not merely put a description of the Cambridge ladies in rhymed verse, he made a poem of it. And it is not for naught that the poems ends with a complex and resonant metaphor for the moon in the sky. In fact, it could be argued that the moon is the most important element in the verse, that everything else works to set up that final image. When you go back now and read the complete verse again, give enough pause at the end of the lines that you hear the rhymes. Notice how thoughts flow across lines and yet the lines are absolutely constructed lines of verse. Notice the effectiveness of that parenthetical. See if you can read the "perhaps" to effect: in tandem with the question mark, it is a very clever little moment in the poem. Finally, glide through those final six lines as a whole, slowly coming to the crescendo of "angry candy." Do not merely think of the critique of the Cambridge ladies, see also that Cummings made something out of words, something subtle yet complex, something damning yet lyrical, something elegantly arranged, something that ends with an insistence that you recognize that you are reading poetry.