E. E. Cummings

Even a Pencil Has Fear to

Even a Pencil Has Fear to - meaning Summary

Perception and Vulnerability

Cummings explores the paradoxes of perception and vulnerability. Using playful, fragmentary lines he compares inanimate objects’ "fear" to the speaker’s response to a woman, suggesting the world’s fragility. The poem turns on a subtle reversal: more important than seeing her is being seen by her, a relational pulsing that resists clear definition. A sudden, colloquial jazz reference and whimsical final lines undercut solemnity and broaden the emotional register.

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even a pencil has fear to do the posed body luckily made a pen is dreadfully afraid of her of this of the smile’s two eyes….too, since the world’s but a piece of eminent fragility. Well and when—Does susceptibility imply perspicuity,or? shut up. Seeing seeing her is not to something or to nothing as much as being by her seen, which has got nothing on something as i think ,did you ever hear a jazz Band? or unnoise men don’t make soup who drink.

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