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.
