The Wonder Paradox by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Author:Jennifer Michael Hecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The poem opens and closes with a heart inside a heart. With the lost Biblical image of unity in love, Adam’s rib becomes two hearts occupying one space. The words are at once caretaking (I’m carrying you for your sake) and talismanic (I’m carrying you for my sake). Love here is even deeper inside the body than ribs, in that tenacious thumping muscle they cage.

The interior of the poem is a brightly frenetic report on this cardiac fusion. To love is to know the world through the beloved’s eyes, even when apart. There is a feeling that we will be apart a lot. The degree of mutuality expressed in “whatever is done / by only me is your doing, my darling” is nearly creepy. Fear is flagged in the tiny, set-off line “i fear.” A hint of fear in a wedding poem can be a safety valve against the pressure of scheduled joy.

The poem’s multiple parentheses feel like ever-greater confidences. There in the plant world’s sexless striving, we find the hunger of human root and human bud. He says that love can reach past a jumble of physical and emotional limits but in calling this “the deepest secret” he acknowledges that optimism is not obvious from experience. How can we hope to exceed our own limits and love’s renowned limitations? The “tree called life” grows and carries us higher. The poem’s final, “i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)” seals us up, like Adam, shy one rib and ready for love.

Cummings was inspired by the imagism of American poets Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, a clean descriptive style animated in part by new contact with Chinese poetry. Also, after a trip to France, he was influenced by surrealism. For all that is new in his free use of language, the poem is essentially in the shape of a sonnet, and is Romantic about love and nature. The e. e. cummings and Guan Daosheng poems are images of marital unity that seem to promise that love survives anyway—despite the realities of fears and separations, growth and recombination. These feelings arise together, true love is like true courage in that there is no real sense to the word unless you are scared; unless you are risking more than you’re holding. Consider poems that reference specifics about your wedding day. Don’t worry about being too on the nose, if you get married in a barn, and you read a poem with a barn in it, it adds a sense of inevitability. It’s memorable. If a poem you love has a bleak part that could feel incongruous with the day, hang a lantern on it: “We love this poem because it contains joy and despair, light and darkness.” Some people trim off disturbing lines, but there is much to be said for letting the poem have a note that plays against the day’s cotton-candy utopian dreams.

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