In Just — and Hemingway
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
One of my favorite poems is “In Just — “ by e. e. cummings. The final lines are:
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
High-school textbook footnotes connect goat-footed with Pan, a god in Greek mythology. But for so spontaneous and natural a poem, that feels like a stretch.
After watching Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I read books about Americans in Paris in the 1920s, and books by Ernest Hemingway. I was surprised to learn that e. e. cummings was in Paris when Hemingway was there, and in A Moveable Feast I stumbled on the following evocation of spring:
In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were all shuttered. The goat-herd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goat-herd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks like sight-seers. The goat-herd took the money from the woman and thanked her and went on up the street piping, and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns bobbing. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk. She wore her felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as she stopped on the stairs outside our door and the shutting of her door. She was the only customer for goat milk in our building.
Both the poem and the Hemingway passage are evocations of spring. And, by chance, both cummings and Hemingway were in Paris at the same time. So, rereading the cummings poem with the Hemingway in mind gives the words of the poem new connotations, makes it more tactile and fresh.
