Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

April in Paris. It sounds almost cliché. And yet…we just returned from a wonderful week there celebrating our anniversary over food and wine and art and miles upon miles of walking. All with the most glorious weather imaginable and all the signs of Spring having sprung.

Samantha and I have been to Paris together before, and we’ve been there in other incarnations prior to our knowing each other, but this trip felt different. It was as if we were seeing Paris anew or for the first time, even when we went to places we’d been before.

And, unlike in the famous song composed by Vernon Duke and lyricist E.Y. Harburg, there was no rain. There’s rain in this poem by e.e. cummings, which also features some of his characteristic challenges to conventional punctuation.

Here is cumming’s “Paris;this April sunset completely utters”:

Paris;this April sunset completely utters
utters serenely silently a cathedral

before whose upward lean magnificent face
the streets turn young with rain,

spiral acres of bloated rose
coiled within cobalt miles of sky
yield to and heed
the mauve
               of twilight(who slenderly descends,
daintily carrying in her eyes the dangerous first stars)
people move love hurry in a gently

arriving gloom and
see!(the new moon
fills abruptly with sudden silver
these torn pockets of lame and begging colour)while
there and here the lithe indolent prostitute
Night,argues

with certain houses
— e.e. cummings