Somewhere I Have Never Traveled - E E Cummings

Somewhere I Have Never Traveled

For my first short writing assignment, I decided to write about E.E. Cummings poem "Somewhere I Have Never Traveled". I really liked this poem in several ways. I also thought this poem had a couple different meaning, and that's what I really like about it. This poem led me to believe one thing, when actually it turned out to have a totally different meaning to it. There are several aspects about this poem that made me choose to write about it.

At first, I thought this poem was about the character telling about how much he loved the little things about a woman. I thought that the line nineteen was about when she looks at him and how overwhelming it was. When I first read this I thought it was such a simple poem about the expression of love for a woman and how she could compare to a rose. I thought that the first line could be saying how he is going to be taking the reader on a journey that is a happy one. I thought the words frail gesture meant the way she moves. There are also a lot of sexual words used in this poem. I noticed the way this poem was wrote also. I noticed the parentheses in it were random, and I thought this was a weird aspect to have in a poem. I also noticed that there was no rhyming to this poem. But, when we discussed this poem in class, I found out what the actual meaning to this was.

When we discussed this poem, I found out that my perception was completely wrong about most of the poem. This is a very passionate poem that has such a powerful hidden meaning. The structure of this poem is also pretty different then I thought too. The random parenthesis I noticed, where put there to show emphasize on the words inside of them. Also, the word "beloved" used in this poem, was used a lot in older poetry, and it just simply means to whom the poem is written about. This is written in five, four- lined stanzas. It is written in first person and the speaker is speaking to a woman. There is a metaphor used in this poem also. A metaphor is a comparison of two things, without using the words like or as. The first stanza is describing how he has never seen someone like her and he has emotions that he can't explain. The words enclose me are comparing to a flower. The second stanza is about how this woman makes him come alive. When he says first rose, he could be referring to this could be her first sex partner. The words, on line seven are describing that he is now the rose. The third stanza is talking about the power she has over him and how she can even close him like the winter does to the flowers. In stanza four, he uses an oxymoron when he says intense fragility. Stanza five is just a very passionate way to end this poem.

To me this was a very good poem. This has so much expression and passion to it. The way this poem showed a totally different meaning after I was able to understand each aspect about it, made it