E. E. Cummings

This Is the Garden: Colours Come and Go

This Is the Garden: Colours Come and Go - meaning Summary

Transient Beauty, Held Briefly

Cummings' poem paints a luminous, music-filled garden where colors and lights appear briefly yet create a suspended, almost sacred atmosphere. Sensory images—flutes, harps, silver fountains—suggest an inner world of enchantment and communal rapture. Time and Death are acknowledged as inevitable forces that will reclaim the flowers, but within the garden the inhabitants remain entranced, implying a tension between transient beauty and moments of timeless, shared experience.

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this is the garden:colours come and go, frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing strong silent greens serenely lingering, absolute lights like baths of golden snow. This is the garden ursed lips do blow upon cool flutes within wide glooms,and sing (of harps celestial to the quivering string) invisible faces hauntingly and slow. This is the garden. Time shall surely reap and on Death's blade lie many a flower curled, in other lands where other songs be sung; yet stand They here enraptured,as among The slow deep trees perpetual of sleep some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

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