E. E. Cummings

My Girl's Tall with Hard Long Eyes

My Girl's Tall with Hard Long Eyes - meaning Summary

Physical Presence and Desire

The poem depicts a speaker’s intimate, restless encounter with a woman described in stark physical terms: tall, taut, and edged with tension. Her hard, surprising body and penetrating smile provoke both pleasurable aches and keen impatience, while the image of thin legs like a spent vine suggests fragility and impending decline. The closing scene of them going to bed mixes urgent desire with a quiet tenderness, capturing complex attraction and vulnerability.

Read Complete Analyses

my girl's tall with hard long eyes as she stands, with her long hard hands keeping silence on her dress, good for sleeping is her long hard body filled with surprise like a white shocking wire, when she smiles a hard long smile it sometimes makes gaily go clean through me tickling aches, and the weak noise of her eyes easily files my impatience to an edge--my girl's tall and taut, with thin legs just like a vine that's spent all of its life on a garden-wall, and is going to die. When we grimly go to bed with these legs she begins to heave and twine about me, and to kiss my face and head.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0