The Idea Of Own Way Of Living In Since Feeling Is First By E.E. Cumming And When I Heard The Learn’D Astronomer By Walt Whitman
Everyone has their own perspective about life, but in society there are some social norms that some actions are not deemed appropriate by our peers and surroundings. In E. E. Cummings poem “since feeling is first” and Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, these two poets give their views about how they perceive the world and to not be like everyone else and that society’s way isn’t always the most interesting one and that’s why I’m going to focus on the social norms that hold people out of their potential that these two poems are trying to challenge.
E. E. Cummings’ poem “since feeling is first” is a particular kind of poem. From the get-go we can see that the poem does not follow a clear pattern concerning the stanzas. The first one is four lines, then two lines, then five lines and so on. The poet is trying to demonstrate that he does not try to be like the other poets trying to follow a certain type of method that would look normal to society. In the first stanza, the speaker talks about if love comes first then why do we “pay any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you”, he is referring to “syntax” as rules made out by society about how it should be and that if he has to obeyed to them, he will never be able to truly love the person he is talking about. He wants to ignore these social norms in order to be able to go further in his relationship. By the end of the poem, the speaker says, “life’s not a paragraph and death I think is no parenthesis”. From my interpretation, the speaker is referring death as being inevitable and that life, “is not a paragraph”, as in the paragraph being the longest part of a text, too short to follow every rule imposed by society’s way of perceiving actions.
Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” on the other hand deals with a similar kind of issue. At the beginning of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, we notice the poem is split into two stanzas. The first paragraph has an anaphora made by the word “When” at the beginning of each sentence like he is reading off a list and that list keeps getting longer with every line that passes. He made use of mostly nouns in the first stanza making the text feel dry with no emotions, “When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me”. Then we arrive at “When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room”, where it confirms that he is the only person in the classroom who isn’t like everyone else enjoying the lecture, but in fact bored out of his mind. All this theory means nothing for him and has absolutely no interest in listening to them. In the next stanza, the speaker feels “tired”and “sick” of astronomy, but his attitude towards it changes when he “wander’d off by himself” his words became livelier and less dry; “In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. ” The speaker starts adding nicer words and adjectives to the nouns. By going out into the world and experiencing it first hands, he actually enjoys it and doesn’t find it boring anymore. Just like in “since feeling is first”, he is implying that he is not like the rest of society, enjoying the lectures of the astronomer, but to go out of the norm and experience it first hands to unlock his fondness of the stars. All that leads us to the human experience.
E. E. Cummings and Walt Whitman were both unsatisfied about how things were going for them trying to obey by society’s standard of life and are trying to say that the thought and feeling in human experience are restricted to all the social norms that society imposes on us if we want to be like the rest of the people. In order for us to be able to go further in developing deeper thoughts and feelings we have to break out of what is deemed acceptable by society and what they will think of us and experience it for ourselves.
