the great advantage of being alive – by ee cummings

by ee cummings

the great advantage of being alive

(instead of undying)is not so much

that mind no more can disprove than prove

what heart may feel and soul may touch

— the great (my darling)happens to be

that love are in we, that love are in we

 

and here is a secret they never will share for whom create is less than have

or one times one than when times where —

that we are in love,that we are in love:

with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do

(for love are in we am in i are in you)

 

this world(as timorous itsters all

to call their cowardice quite agree)

shall never discover our touch and feel

–for love are in we are in love are in we;

for you are and i am and we are(above

and under all possible worlds)in love

 

a billion brains may coax undeath

from fancied fact and spaceful time–

no heart can leap,no soul can breathe

but by the sizeless truth of a dream

whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.

For love are in you am in i are in we

******

Recently, an edition of e.e. cumming’s ‘Complete Poems’ arrived for me. A few of his poems are readily available on the internet, and known by many. For example ‘since feeling is first’ never fails to inspire me. But as experience has always told me, a poet’s most well-known ‘classics’ are never their best work. Their best work have to be sought after with work and dedication, rifling among their enormous oeuvre of work. Their best work often lie in obscurity among their ‘complete works’. And that is why anthologies are so unrewarding. The editors, of the huge classics like Oxford anthologies especially, are virtuosos themselves. But they still have to cater to public taste, and inevitably, some less refined but more accessible poem, from a great poet who is capable of much greater sophistication, has to be included.

And so, I want to bring into the light some of his more obscure, but infinitely more powerful poems

What I understand from this poem

The relentless onset of life and work means that unfortunately, I have no time to be extremely analytical about all poems that I love, but anyway here is my understanding, on face value of the words:

The great advantage of being truly alive, instead of just going through the motions of life like someone who can’t think (in which case life might as well be death), is not that you can set out to prove rationally what the human heart feels and why it feels that way or what the human soul touches on and why it does it that way. The great advantage of being alive, what makes life more than the state of death, my darling, happens to be that as humans we get to love. Yes, we get to love.

And here is secret that they will never share. By they, I mean the people who only see the value of consuming and possessing, and don’t understand the value of creating art, or of creating in general. These people also don’t understand that when we are in love, experiences are double, tripled, many times more valuable, means more than the number of times that we have experienced something in life. (ie. experiences have to be valued by the love and joy inherent in the process, the subjective experience of it, and not the objective ‘number’ of times that we have experienced something) These people live life without love, and what they do in life don’t count as anything, whereas we have love and we can love, so what we have is one more experience in life than them.

The rest of this world who live like them, will never understand our lives, how we see, touch and feel this life, because we are filled in love, we are in love, and both you and i are in love with each other above anything that is in, above, or under this world.

A billion brains can work together to rationalize how life is different from death from complex, abstract facts and analyzing space and time, but I know that no human heart can leap and no human soul can breathe except by dreams, and dreams are the only truth and their importance is immeasurable (‘sizeless’). Dreams are part of this world, and so even when dreams are dormant, they are part of us, as we see in the sky, the earth and the sea. We see dreams as part of nature, this world, because we are in love, we are able to love, and this is the way that we live and see life.