anyone lived in a pretty how town by E. E. Cummings

First published: 1940, in Fifty Poems

Type of poem: Narrative

The Poem

The poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is basically a narrative with a strong lyric component—that is to say, it is a ballad. Written in nine variably rhyming quatrain stanzas, it does not show a normative or “running” verse foot, such as the iamb; therefore, the poem is written in podic prosody, a system of accentual verse that is sometimes called “folk meters.” It is the prosody in which most nursery rhymes and folk ballads are written, which accounts for its strongly rhythmical quality. Specifically, the lines have four stresses, or are “tetrapodic.”

E. E. Cummings was in many ways a sentimental poet, although he hid this sentimentality with all sorts of typographical, grammatic, syntactic, and rhetorical tricks and, sometimes, with a slangy and “wise-guy” level of diction, though that is not the case with this poem. Complicating his essential sentimentality was his rather sarcastic outlook on life: Cummings did not care for what he called “mostpeople,” who, it seemed to him, were against culture and art and were too wrapped up in the quotidian—Cummings’s “mostpeople” were what H. L. Mencken called the “booboisie.” Very often this split-mindedness of Cummings led to what might almost be called a schizoid poetry, and no poem more so than “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” which tells the story of a person named “anyone” and his lover, “noone” (that is to say “no one”). Anyone lived in a town where “women and men . . ./ cared for” him “not at all.” They “sowed” their seeds of negativism in their dull lives. Some of their children guessed that there was someone in town, the woman named “noone,” who loved him, yet even the children forgot this as they grew older. Nevertheless, “noone” loved “anyone” so much that his “any was all to her.”

As life went along, the townsfolk lived their ordinary lives, “someones married their everyones,” the children grew up, and “anyone” and “noone” grew older; “one day anyone died i guess/ (and noone stooped to kiss his face).” Nobody else paid much attention. Eventually “noone” died as well, and “busy folk buried them side by side.” Still, life went on; people continued doing what they do in all seasons, beneath the rising and setting sun, moon, and stars, in all weathers.

That is the basic story, but it can also be read in a diametrically opposite way. Take, for example, line 4 of the third stanza, which can be read either as “noone loved him,” or as “no one loved him.” Stanza 7 might mean “one day anyone died,” or “one day anyone died” (anyone at all); and either “noone stooped to kiss his face” or “no one” did. In what way are these two people, anyone and noone, to be distinguished from mostpeople? Are they to be distinguished at all? Are they, perhaps, representative of “someones” and “everyones”? There is a deliberate ambiguity about the story Cummings is telling.

Forms and Devices

From the very first line, the poem’s ambiguity is seen to be a purposeful component of the poem, for Cummings uses the technique of hypallage: rearrangement of syntax—word order—in a sentence. “[A]nyone lived in a pretty how town” can be put back into a more normal form easily: “Anyone lived in how pretty a town,” or “How anyone lived in a pretty town.” He chose neither of these forms because he intended the poem to be ambiguous, and he chose a syntactic form that would imply both constructions, and perhaps others as well—for example, “How pretty a town anyone lived in.” The second line continues and reinforces the double sense of the first; it could just as easily be read, “(with so many bells floating up, down).”

Like many ballads, this one has a refrain; in fact, it has more than one. There is a listing of the seasons which appears as line 3 of the first and second stanzas and line 2 of the last stanza. This is an “incremental” refrain, because it is slightly changed each time it appears—the order of the seasons is switched. A second refrain is “sun moon stars rain,” which appears as line 4 of stanza 2, the first line of stanza 6, and the last line of the poem. The second time this refrain appears it is incremental, but the third time it reverts to its original order. A third demi-refrain is “Women and men (both little and small),” which appears incrementally one time as the first line of the last stanza, “Women and men (both dong and ding),” a reference to the sounds of the floating bells. A fourth is line 3 of stanza 2, “they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same,” which reappears in the penultimate line as “reaped their sowing and went their came.”

This last refrain illustrates another rhetorical device that Cummings uses throughout the poem, antithesis in parallel constructions: “he sang his didn’t he danced his did”; “and down they forgot as up they grew”; “she laughed his joy she cried his grief.” These parallel repetitive schemes are mirrored in other lines that do not repeat but give almost the effect of refrains, as in the first line of the fourth stanza, “when by now and tree by leaf,” and the first line of the penultimate stanza, “all by all and deep by deep,” which continues into the next line, “and more by more.” The rest of this stanza is similarly constructed.

All these sonic devices give the poem an extremely lyrical quality even though the rhyme scheme is not exact and at times, the lines do not rhyme. For example, although the poem begins with a rhyming couplet, the next two lines do not chime at all. The next stanza also begins with couplet rhyme, but the following two lines consonate (they off-rhyme). Consonance is often a feature of the anonymous folk ballad; here, it appears in a literary ballad.

The third stanza does the same thing, but the fourth goes back to the pattern of the first—though if one looks closely, one will see that the last line ends with the word “her,” which light-rhymes with line 3 of stanza 1, “winter.” An examination of the poem will disclose many other effects on the sonic level, including assonance (“how town”); alliteration (“spring,” “summer,” “sang”); consonantal echo (the m sounds of stanza 2); cross-rhyme (“stir” and “her”); and internal consonance (“bird” and “stir”).

Bibliography

Ahearn, Barry, ed. Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Bloom, Harold, ed. E. E. Cummings: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.

Dumas, Bethany K. E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles. London: Vision Press, 1974.

Kennedy, Richard S. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Kidder, Rushworth M. E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Lane, Gary. I Am: A Study of E. E. Cummings’ Poems. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976.

Norman, Charles. The Magic Maker: E. E. Cummings. Rev. ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.

Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. E. E. Cummings: A Biography. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2004.

Wegner, Robert E. The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.