Perhaps one of the best love poems ever written, “I carry your heart with me” is also the most versatile. It could be read as a marriage vow, a joyous ode to a newborn and well-loved baby, or even a eulogy to a lost love. Since love can take many forms, from the carnal and intense to visceral blood ties, this poem is adaptable to all kinds and levels of love.
Typically, E. E. Cummings uses typography to add depth to the tone and rhythm of his poem. In this poem, he freely uses parentheses to almost write a poem within a poem, while at the same time emphasizing his theme “i carry you heart with me.” In the stanza beginning “here is the deepest secret nobody knows,” the poet uses this typographic device by almost “burying” three intensely descriptive lines with surely the best metaphors ever used in poetry:
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope…)
The poet, in fact, gets “to the heart” of the matter of what devotion is all about. True love, to be really true, must be selfless. From the outset of this beautiful piece, the author accomplishes just that in an intentionally prepossessing way that leaves no doubt of his true and obsessive dedication to the “heart” that he carries.
The poem also carries somewhat of a sonnet-like tone, although deviating from the number of lines, rhythm, and rhyming style. Nevertheless, its theme and tone remind the reader of some of the classic sonnets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” Also, like a sonnet, the final two lines actually rhyme.
Finally, the poet manages to insert some rather awe-inspiring natural imagery into this great little poem: “and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant / and whatever a sun will always sing is you.” Not only that, the wonder of his love is what is “keeping the stars apart.” In those bits of romantic hyperbole, Cummings enters the realm of Scotland’s beloved Burns, who in his “O My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose” says that his love is likewise enduring and meaningful: “And I will love thee still, my dear / Tell a’ the seas gang dry” and “…the rocks melt wi’ the sun!”