You Shall Above All Things
You Shall Above All Things - meaning Summary
Joy as Living Identity
Cummings urges the reader to value youth and gladness as ways of being that shape experience and identity. Joy and vitality make life fit the person, while cerebral knowledge and 'progress' risk deadening feeling and love. The poem celebrates a singular intimate love that overturns conventional categories and rejects abstract negation. It ends by privileging lived, creative knowing — learning from one bird's song — over attempting to control or rationalize the universe.
Read Complete Analysesyou shall above all things be glad and young For if you're young,whatever life you wear it will become you;and if you are glad whatever's living will yourself become. Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need: i can entirely her only love whose any mystery makes every man's flesh put space on;and his mind take off time that you should ever think,may god forbid and (in his mercy) your true lover spare: for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave called progress,and negation's dead undoom. I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
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