"if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind—if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy—if through my singing slips
the very skilful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

—let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death”—
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul." –

Excerpted from XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems, Oxford University Press, 1950

e.e. cummings occupies a singular place in twentieth-century poetry. While many of his modernist peers dismantled tradition in pursuit of impersonality or abstraction, Cummings broke form in order to bring readers closer to the pulse of lived experience. He bent grammar, fractured syntax, scattered parentheses across the page, and yet the core of his work remained stubbornly romantic: love, spring, the body, the renewal of life. His poems are often playful, sometimes ecstatic, but beneath the whimsy lies a profound seriousness about intimacy and creation. Among his vast body of work, one love poem in particular stands as a pinnacle of this vision: “if i have made, my lady, intricate imperfect various things,” certainly one of the most exquisite love poems in his entire canon.

On the page, the poem appears jagged, its line breaks and parentheses interrupting smooth progression. Cummings uses these devices not as ornament but as a way to layer meaning. Parentheses mark the interior voice against the public one, the intimate aside against the outer declaration—just as in the beloved “i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart).” Visually, the poem looks like hesitation, doubt, fragments of confession. But when read aloud, the lines resolve into rhythm with startling clarity. Syllables fall into beats, phrases into measures, as though the poem conceals a musical score beneath its broken typography. What the eye perceives as fractured, the ear hears as balance.

The first movement flows in lyric ease, each line forming a phrase that can be counted like a bar of music. The humility of the opening—“if i have made, my lady, intricate / imperfect various things”—sets a tone of confession, the poet admitting that his creations are flawed. Yet the rhythm is steady, the cadences assured. Then comes a break, a sudden percussive shift in tempo with “LET the world say.” It is as though the melody has been interrupted by the strike of a drum. From here, the poem unfolds like a suite in four movements, each with its own tempo and cadence.

The opening is andante cantabile, flowing and lyrical. Cummings works within the ghost of iambic pentameter, bending it into something supple and conversational. A line like “frailer than most deep dreams are frail” has the balanced rise and fall of a perfect 4-beat measure, while “songs less firm than your body’s whitest song upon my mind” stretches into a long, breathy bar, like a melody played legato.

Then comes the break, allegro marcato, sharp and percussive. “LET the world say” crashes in like a drum stroke, breaking the lyrical spell. The music suddenly shifts from flowing phrases to accented blows, the rhythm itself enacting the clash between public judgment and private truth.

The staccato passage that follows is molto vivace, syllables struck with hammer-like regularity. In “who are so perfectly alive my shame,” each word lands with equal weight, creating a rolling snare-drum effect. This is the thunderclap of the poem, where rhythm embodies the beloved’s vitality and the poet’s humility.

Finally, the adagio con forza of the resolution. The tempo slows, the lines lengthen, and the imagery blossoms into its most graphic power: “lady through whose profound and fragile lips / the sweet small clumsy feet of April came.” Here, rhythm lengthens into a deep cadence, like the final chord of a symphony. The imagery of birth and renewal transforms the poet’s “ragged meadow” into a soul reborn.

What makes this architecture remarkable is how Cummings deconstructs the sonnet’s heritage of iambic pentameter and rebuilds it as something new: not mechanical da-DUMs but living measures, each phrase its own bar of music. Variation and repetition are used with such skill that the poem feels simultaneously free and flawless. In this way, he rescues form itself, showing that a modern poem can abandon the strictures of meter without losing balance, musicality, or grace.

The imagery here is not coy. Those “profound and fragile lips” through which emerge the “sweet small clumsy feet of April” unmistakably suggest the act of childbirth. The metaphor is graphic, embodied, and deeply personal. Cummings aligns his beloved with the mystery of creation itself: she is the one through whom life comes into the world. April, of course, is not merely a month but the archetype of renewal—the first crocuses after the thaw, the tender awkwardness of spring. The clumsy feet evoke both the literal newborn and the season of innocence, and together they transform the poet’s “ragged meadow” into a soul reborn.

Biographically, Cummings had lived through estrangement from his own daughter, Nancy, born in 1919. He was not present at her birth, nor did he raise her as a child, but the imagery of renewal, innocence, and natality appears again and again in his poetry. He returned often to April as a symbol of beginnings, of life pushing up through difficulty. And he knew the intimacy of birth from the lives of his friends and lovers, from his immersion in bohemian circles where domestic experience was never entirely separate from artistic life. The graphic detail here suggests a man who had witnessed birth firsthand, and who could not help but translate the memory into art.

The miracle of the poem is how rhythm and imagery unite. The humility of its opening, the sudden percussive break, the staccato roll, and the final adagio cadence are not arbitrary. They are the musical equivalents of love itself—hesitant, broken, humbled, then renewed. The beloved becomes not only muse but the channel of creation. Art may be flawed, but life, emerging awkward and clumsy, redeems the artist’s imperfections.

This is why the poem endures as one of Cummings’s greatest achievements. It embodies everything he sought: the daring of modernist form joined to the timeless depth of romantic poetry. Spoken aloud, it is flawless music. Read silently, it challenges the eye with fragmentation but rewards the inner ear with song. And in its conclusion, it delivers an image at once personal and universal: new life, April’s gift, clumsy feet stepping into the ragged meadow of the soul.

After a hundred readings, or a thousand, the effect remains the same: wonder. Cummings, in his most intimate mode, gives us not only a love poem but a masterpiece of rhythm, symbol, and renewal.

om tat sat