E. E. Cummings

You Said Is

You Said Is - meaning Summary

Intimacy, Doubt, and Nature

Cummings presents a brief domestic scene where lovers exchange playful questions about beauty, mortality, and belief. The speaker deflects a compliment by locating beauty in sensory presence and an almost mystical spring air that mixes permanence and negation. Tender physical imagery — a lattice, moving hands and light touches — shifts into a conversational natural image of wind and rain, suggesting differing attitudes toward commitment versus cultivation of the present.

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you said Is there anything which is dead or alive more beautiful than my body,to have in your fingers (trembling ever so little)? Looking into your eyes Nothing,i said,except the air of spring smelling of never and forever. ....and through the lattice which moved as if a hand is touched by a hand(which moved as though fingers touch a girl's breast, lightly) Do you believe in always,the wind said to the rain I am too busy with my flowers to believe,the rain answered

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