When I Have Thought Of You Somewhat Too - Analysis

Lust as a doorway, not an endpoint

The poem’s central move is to treat arousal as a kind of ignition that blows open perception: the speaker starts in a bluntly physical register and ends with a strangely tender, mocking image of the self. He begins by admitting he has thought of you somewhat too / much, and that thinking has made him not sentimental but perfectly and / simply Lustful. Yet even in this heat, the poem insists on love—understand / i love you—as if the point of naming lust is to clear space for a more total surrender. Lust here isn’t opposed to love; it’s the bodily proof that love is happening in real time, in muscle and breath.

Before shutting: the body takes over the grammar

The first “turn” is the moment the speaker stops describing desire and starts feeling what desire will do to him: sense a gradual stir / of beginning muscle, and then the phrase before shutting suggests eyelids, doors, or the mind itself closing down. Cummings’s ellipses (the repeated ….) make the sentences behave like panting: thought breaks, then returns as sensation. When the beloved’s body suddenly reaches with a speed of white speech, touch becomes language—fast, bright, almost blinding. The speaker doesn’t “say” anything; the bodies do the speaking.

The flash of “Yes” and the world in the blood

After the parenthetical (the simple instant of perfect hunger / Yes), the poem enlarges from bed to cosmos. That Yes feels like consent, climax, and a philosophical affirmation all at once—a single syllable that fuses appetite with acceptance. Immediately, the outside world is pulled inside the speaker: how beautifully swims / the fooling world in my huge blood. The world doesn’t stand apart as scenery; it circulates in him, as if desire has turned his bloodstream into an ocean carrying everything. The adjective fooling matters: even at the height of rapture, he suspects reality is playful, slippery, not fully reliable.

Light that cracks brains, and a self that chatters

Ecstasy isn’t presented as calm enlightenment; it is violent and confusing. The poem’s bright surge becomes A swiftlyenormous light capable of cracking brains, a line that makes pleasure feel like impact—too much for ordinary thinking. At the same time, the mind doesn’t gracefully dissolve; it panics. The chattering self keeps talking inside the moment, and it registers the experience with hysterical fright. That’s a key tension: the body says Yes, while the self—habit, ego, inner narrator—freaks out at being outpaced. Even the word prismatic suggests that sensation is splitting into too many colors to name, while furiously puzzling captures how the mind tries to turn intensity back into something manageable.

The final joke: we are all tadpoles in “delicious mud”

The ending refuses to make the speaker a hero of passion. Instead, the self is reduced to a comic tadpole wriggling—small, half-formed, ridiculous—and the place it wriggles is delicious mud, an image that’s both earthy and affectionate. The poem’s daring claim is that the most overwhelming, luminous moment (swiftlyenormous light) doesn’t upgrade the self into purity; it exposes how basic and funny consciousness is when it’s submerged in the body. And yet the mud is delicious: the joke isn’t contempt. It’s a kind of relieved honesty—love and lust don’t free us from being creatures; they let us feel, without flinching, that being a creature is enough.

If the self is “comic,” what is the fear protecting?

The poem’s most unsettling suggestion is that the hysterical fright may come less from sex than from losing the story of oneself. When the beloved arrives with white speech, language is no longer owned by the speaker; when the world swims in his blood, the boundary between me and everything else breaks. The tadpole image then reads like a defense mechanism: a joke the mind tells to keep the vastness from being taken seriously—so the speaker can return from Yes to a nameable self.