E. E. Cummings

A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves

A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves - meaning Summary

Compassion Against Indifference

The poem depicts an encounter with a beaten, neglected man lying by the road while passersby ignore him. Details of his degraded dress and frozen, grinning face evoke social neglect and bodily ruin. The speaker, moved to pity, gathers the man into his arms and staggers away through a surreal, cosmic space. The poem contrasts civic indifference with individual compassion and suggests a human connection that transcends ordinary social boundaries.

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a man who had fallen among thieves lay by the roadside on his back dressed in fifteenthrate ideas wearing a round jeer for a hat fate per a somewhat more than less emancipated evening had in return for consciousness endowed him with a changeless grin whereon a dozen staunch and Meal citizens did graze at pause then fired by hypercivic zeal sought newer pastures or because swaddled with a frozen brook of pinkest vomit out of eyes which noticed nobody he looked as if he did not care to rise one hand did nothing on the vest its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt while the mute trouserfly confessed a button solemnly inert. Brushing from whom the stiffened puke i put him all into my arms and staggered banged with terror through a million billion trillion stars

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