E. E. Cummings

God Gloats Upon Her Stunning Flesh

God Gloats Upon Her Stunning Flesh - meaning Summary

Divine and Bodily Conflict

The poem depicts a tense, paradoxical encounter between divine power and sensual, chaotic nature. Cummings blurs gender and deity as God both gloating and diminished before Her—an elemental, hunger-driven Sea whose bodily force unsettles cosmic order. Images of appetite, violence, and worship collapse into each other: divine awe becomes terror, beauty becomes threat, and the heavens react with writhing stars. The tone is mythic, intense, and ambiguous.

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god gloats upon Her stunning flesh. Upon the rechings of Her green body among unseen things, things obscene (Whose fingers young the caving ages curiously con) —but the lunge of Her hunger softly flung over the gasping shores leaves his smile wan, and his blood stopped hears in the frail anon the shovings and the lovings of Her tongue. god Is The Sea.  All terrors of his being quake before this its hideous Work most old Whose battening gesture prophecies a freeing of ghostly chaos in this dangerous night through moaned space god worships God— (behold! where chaste stars writhe captured in brightening fright)

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