In Making Marjorie God Hurried - Analysis

A creation story that feels like a violation

The poem’s central claim is brutally simple: this woman’s body has been “made” by forces that treat her as a product, and the speaker can’t look at her without feeling both desire and grief. Cummings begins with a blasphemous Genesis: in making Marjorie god hurried. The word hurried matters. This is not patient artistry but rushed manufacture, and the result is a mismatched, exploited hybridity: a boy’s body set on unsuspicious / legs of girl. Right away, the poem frames gender as something assembled, not honored—an accident of construction that will later become a site of use.

The tone here is outwardly playful—Cummings can sound like he’s joking with adjectives and odd combinations—but the play curdles into something aggressive. God’s hands are replaced by hands that don’t caress; they quarried a face and slapped a mouth. Even before the poem explicitly turns to money, it makes touch feel like extraction and punishment.

Hands that sculpt, hands that strike

The poem keeps returning to hands, as if trying to locate responsibility. his left hand quarried suggests mining stone: the face is quartzlike, hard, bright, and impersonal—something you dig out of the earth, not someone you meet. Meanwhile his right slapped the mouth, described in a dizzying chain—amusing big vital vicious—as though the speaker can’t decide whether this mouth is comic, alive, predatory, or simply too much. The mouth becomes a vegetable, an insult that turns her into matter: something grown, handled, consumed.

That double-handedness is a key tension: the poem keeps mixing “making” with “hurting.” Quarrying sounds like artistry but is also violence against a landscape. Slapping is unambiguously violent, yet it sits beside almost painterly attention to color and texture. The language insists that what looks like aesthetic appreciation can be inseparable from control.

Cosmetics as tiny sunsets, affection as a smear

After the slap, the poem offers a sudden, almost pretty gesture: Upon the whole he suddenly clapped / a tiny sunset of vermouth. The phrase tiny sunset makes lipstick (or blush) sound like a private horizon, a small piece of evening pinned to the body. Yet the verb clapped keeps the motion abrupt, even comic—less like applying makeup than slapping on a brand. The color is vermouth-colour, a drink reference that nudges the scene toward nightlife, toward bars, toward purchase.

Then comes a staccato inventory—Hair.—as if the speaker’s gaze can only list parts. The poem doesn’t linger in a stable admiration; it keeps breaking her into surfaces to be arranged. This is where the title’s hurry lands: she is assembled from details quickly enough that personhood never quite arrives.

The “moist mistake” and the speaker’s sudden tears

The most startling line is the one that sounds closest to tenderness and closest to contempt at the same time: he put between / her lips a moist mistake. Whatever the literal referent—tongue, kiss, something sexual—the phrase moist mistake turns intimacy into error. It suggests that even the act meant to animate her (give her voice, give her breath, give her pleasure) is a kind of misplacement. And yet that “mistake” has fragrance, and the speaker admits it hurls / me into tears.

This is a hinge in the poem’s emotional logic. Up to this point, the poem’s energy is swaggering, tactile, and domineering; tears don’t belong in that register. The tears imply the speaker has stumbled into recognition—maybe of her vulnerability, maybe of his own complicity, maybe of how desire turns people into objects while still insisting it is love. The contradiction is naked: he can be moved by her “fragrance” and still participate in her reduction.

“Dusty new-ness” and an “obsolete gaze” that still leans

Cummings gives Marjorie a gaze, but it’s a damaged one: the dusty new-ness of her obsolete gaze. Newness and obsolescence collide, as if she is both freshly presented and already used up. Dusty new-ness sounds like something bought from a shelf and immediately dulled—new on paper, old in reality. And obsolete suggests a person treated like last season’s device: once desirable, now replaceable.

Still, the gaze begins to. lean… / a little against me. That lean is tiny, tentative, and it’s the closest the poem gets to mutuality: a slight pressure, a moment that could be comfort or fatigue. But the ellipses and the broken pacing make it feel like the moment can’t fully happen. Even her leaning is interrupted, as if the world of the poem doesn’t permit sustained gentleness.

The last turn: from God’s hurry to the price of hips

The final couplet lands like a trapdoor: hen for two / dollars i fill her hips with boys and girls. Whatever dream of creation or romance the earlier lines flirt with is replaced by a blunt marketplace. The speaker shifts into the first person—i fill her hips—and the poem’s earlier “making” becomes an explicit act of purchase and use. Two dollars is not just cheap; it is humiliatingly casual, as if the poem wants us to feel how easily a life can be priced.

The phrase boys and girls turns sex into reproduction, or at least into the idea of reproduction—hips as containers, bodies as factories. It also echoes the poem’s opening mismatch, a boy’s body and legs of girl, as though the violence of categories at the start ends in the production of categories at the end. The speaker’s earlier tears now look less like innocence and more like a self-excusing sentimentality: he can cry and still buy.

A sharper question the poem forces

If god hurried, who benefits from that hurry? The poem keeps inviting the reader to blame a cosmic maker, but the ending reveals a human economy—the speaker’s two / dollars, his power to fill, his right to narrate her as a set of parts. The most unsettling possibility is that invoking God is a way to dodge responsibility: to pretend this is fate or design when it is, in fact, transaction.

What the poem won’t let us forget about Marjorie

Even in its objectifying language, the poem can’t erase the faint pressure of that obsolete gaze leaning against me. That lean is the poem’s moral residue: a reminder that a person is present inside the surfaces. But the poem refuses a clean rescue. It ends in a sentence where “I” acts, money speaks, and Marjorie’s hips become a site for someone else’s story. The grief, then, isn’t only for her; it’s for a world where creation, desire, and commerce blur until no one can tell whether they’re touching a person or merely handling what they’ve paid to handle.