Love Is More Thicker Than Forget - Analysis

Love as a Thing That Breaks Comparisons

Cummings’ central claim is that love can’t be measured by the ordinary tools we use to measure experience—memory, success, even logic itself—so the poem deliberately talks in paradoxes that feel almost like glitches. Right away, love is more thicker than forget and more thinner than recall: it exceeds two opposite mental acts at once. The poem doesn’t treat that as a mistake to fix; it treats it as the most accurate way to speak about something that refuses a single, stable definition.

The repeated pattern of more and less makes love sound like a quantity, but every comparison collapses as soon as it appears. Love is more frequent than to fail (astonishingly generous), yet also more seldom than a wave is wet (which implies almost never). The speaker keeps trying to pin love down, and the poem keeps showing that pinning it down is exactly what love won’t allow.

Memory vs. Love: A Fight Love Wins

The first stanza quietly sets up a rivalry between love and the mind’s record-keeping. Forget and recall are not just opposites; they’re the ways we organize a life into what can be kept and what gets lost. Love, here, doesn’t obey either function. Calling it thicker than forgetting suggests it has weight and persistence: it doesn’t simply evaporate when neglected. But calling it thinner than recall suggests it can also slip through the fingers—more delicate than our ability to retrieve a moment on demand. The tension is sharp: love is both what stays and what won’t hold still.

Even the line more frequent than to fail carries an edge. Failure is something humans do repeatedly; to claim love happens even more often is to imply love is a kind of background condition—almost a weather system—rather than a rare achievement. Yet the poem refuses to let that become sentimental certainty, because it also insists love is more seldom than the wetness of a wave. Love is constant, and love is scarce. That contradiction feels like lived experience: omnipresent in longing, intermittent in possession.

Moon-Logic and the Strange Word unbe

The second stanza shifts into a dreamier register: love is most mad and moonly. The moon suggests night, tides, lunacy—forces that pull without asking permission. Then Cummings invents unbe, a word that sounds like the opposite of existence. Saying love is less it shall unbe than the sea’s depth is a wild claim: love is less likely to un-exist than the ocean is deep. The sea image doubles back on itself—all the sea which only / is deeper than the sea—as if the poem is saying: even my largest metaphor can only point to itself. Love exceeds even the biggest thing I can name.

The Turn: From moonly to sunly

The third and fourth stanzas repeat the earlier strategy but tilt the emotional light. Now the comparisons revolve around outcomes and moral acts: to win, alive, forgive. Love is less always than to win, which sounds like a refusal to equate love with success or conquest. But it’s also less never than alive: it belongs to life so intimately that it can’t be excluded from it. Here’s the poem’s key tension: love is not a trophy, but it is a condition of being.

Then comes the reversal of mood: most sane and sunly. The same force that was mad under the moon is now sanity in daylight. Love doesn’t change; the speaker’s angle of approach does. The final claim, more it cannot die, mirrors the earlier unbe—two ways of insisting that love resists negation. And again the metaphor goes maximal: all the sky which only / is higher than the sky. The poem ends by admitting that language can’t climb past its own ceiling; it can only keep reaching.

A Hard Question Hidden in the Brightness

If love is both more frequent than failure and more seldom than wet waves, what kind of human experience does that describe—having love everywhere around you, yet almost never fully in hand? The poem’s insistence that love is simultaneously most mad and most sane suggests the cost of loving might be precisely this: you have to live inside contradictions without solving them.

Why the Poem Sounds Like It’s Arguing with Itself

The poem’s strange comparative grammar—more thicker, more thinner, less bigger, less littler—isn’t decorative; it enacts the poem’s idea that love scrambles the usual categories. By the end, the reader is left with something like a compass that points in two directions at once. Love, in Cummings’ account, is not an answer you can store like recall or erase like forget. It is the force that keeps outrunning every attempt to say what it is, and that outrunning—restless, radiant, and unreasonable—is the poem’s truest definition.