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Read-Around is Thursday, April 20, 2023 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Now that we have survived the winter of discontent, the stormy earth (angry at us—her begotten children?) calms down and offers us the mercy of spring. For every disrespect, every poke and prod, every use and abuse, we have laid upon our worldly mother, the return of sunny days and budding beauty always feels like a redemption. A kind of forgiveness we can generally only imagine from a saint, an angel, or a diety. Or so it seems to me upon reading E. E. Cummings poem, O Sweet Spontaneous. Cummings addresses the earth using the pronouns of old English, thee and thou, which associates, for many of us, with Blblical texts, and, therefore, with the sacred (and which, I just realized, are gender neutral!).

Cummings—known for his rule-bending syntax, his jarring enjambment, and his love for leaping lines—uses this archaic language to personify and sanctify the earth. It is easy to fall into the wonderland of his language; easy to be swept into a feeling of reverence. And reverence is the perfect state to invoke a sacred relationship with the earth.

In the process, he delivers another message about tolerance, potentially even about turning the other cheek in the face of abuse, and an exuberant kind of resilience. The spiritual overtones are no surprise given that Cummings was raised the son of a Unitarian Minister, although he was (again, no surprise) quite rebellious and fiiercely independent, much to his father’s dismay. His idiosyncratic style is a natural expression of his penchant for breaking the rules. He often pulled it off like a breathe of fresh air, as he does in this poem, inspiring others to break out of the mold and step into a new relationship with life—a relationship that is best expressed using the metaphor of spring.

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts in the column on the right

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

O Sweet Spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers 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)

E. E. Cummings
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148505/o-sweet-spontaneous-5bf31932ce110

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about the Earth or about your relationship with the Earth.

  2. Journal or write a poem about the coming of spring, especially after a hard winter.

  3. What do the pronouns, thee and thou, and suffix additions, like answerest, evoke for you? journal or write a poem using the prompt: When I think of thee…

  4. Just as Cummings uses a language of respect for spring, personifying and even deifying it, consider journaling or writing a poem personifying or deifying a subject of your choice. It could be a concept, like justice or truth, or something from nature, like clouds or the sea, etc. .

  5. Journal or write a poem about being pinched, poked, or prodded (like a medical exam), or a time, when you pinched poked or prodded someone else, (like a science experiment, or in play as a child)

  6. What is your answer when life, pinches, pokes, prods, and squeezes you?

  7. In what way is death a rhythmic lover? Journal or write a poem about death. Or use Cummngs expression for the prompt: Death, my rhythmic lover… or On the incomparable couch of death, I…

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.