I Walked The Boulevard - Analysis

A boulevard as a showcase of corrupted family life

The poem’s central move is to take a familiar public scene—a walk down a boulevard—and make it feel like a moral exhibit: not simply a poor family in motion, but a whole social order where innocence is pushed forward while adult appetites lumber behind. Cummings frames the child first, giving her a flash of kinetic happiness, then steadily enlarges the adults into grotesque caricatures until the final disclosure—how she was with child—lands like a verdict. The boulevard becomes a place where life is visibly reproducing itself, but in a way the speaker can only describe with disgust.

The dirty child’s joy, and why it doesn’t stay simple

The opening image is almost tender in its energy: a dirty child skating on noisy wheels of joy. Those wheels matter: they’re loud, public, impossible to ignore. Yet the joy is immediately complicated by the child’s pathetic dress fluttering. Joy and pathetic collide—her play is real, but it is dressed in deprivation, and the fluttering suggests something thin, exposed, insufficient. The poem doesn’t let the child’s movement become a pure symbol of freedom; it insists that even her happiness is inseparable from how she is seen, clothed, and carried through the street.

The “mothermonster”: love turned into pursuit

Behind the child comes the mother, but she is not introduced as mother so much as creature: a mothermonster with a red grumbling face, cluttered in pursuit, pleasantly elephantine. The contradiction inside pleasantly and elephantine is the poem’s kind of cruelty: the adjective tries to soften what the noun makes heavy. The mother is huge, noisy, and vaguely comic—but also menacing, a presence that chases rather than cares. Even the phrase in pursuit makes maternal duty feel like something breathless and animal, not chosen or gentle. The child’s forward motion now looks less like independence and more like being driven, as if the family’s gravity is always just a few steps behind.

The father’s body as a public joke

Then the poem pivots to the father, and the gaze becomes even more pointed: a thick cheerful man with majestic bulbous lips and forlorn piggish hands. Cummings mixes grandeur and abasement in the same breath—majestic beside bulbous, forlorn beside piggish—to show a man whose confidence is real but whose humanity has been reduced to appetite. He is not shown working, protecting, or guiding; he is shown joked, in public, performing himself as jovial flesh. The description makes his body into a social fact: this is what masculinity looks like here—expansive, cheerful, and vaguely obscene.

The girlish whore and the poem’s hardest tension

The final figure sharpens the poem’s most disturbing contradiction: the father jokes to a girlish whore, whose busy rhythmic mouth and sily purple eyelids turn her into a set of animated surfaces—mouth, eyelids, rhythm, color. Calling her girlish while naming her a whore forces youth and sexual commerce into the same phrase, and the father’s conversation ends with pregnancy: how she was with child. The poem’s tension is that new life appears not as hope but as continuation—another child arriving through a world of pursuit, jokes, and transactions. The skating child at the start suddenly feels like an omen: wheels that carry joy, yes, but also carry her forward into the adults’ boulevard.

A question the poem refuses to soothe

If the child’s wheels are noisy, it’s because the scene is not private suffering but public normality. The poem presses a harsh question: when the adults are described as monsters and pigs, is the speaker condemning them—or condemning a society that has left them nothing but bulk, pursuit, and jokes? Either way, the child’s joy doesn’t rescue the scene; it makes the scene harder to bear, because it shows how early the cycle can look like play.