the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls by E. E. Cummings

First published: 1923, in Tulips and Chimneys

Type of poem: Sonnet

The Poem

E. E. Cummings’s sonnet now known as “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” was originally published without a title in a section of Cummings’s first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923). That section, labeled “Chimneys,” is divided into three subsections: “Realities,” “Unrealities,” and “Actualities.” This particular poem, included in the first subsection, is an example of how Cummings uses a traditional verse form—the fourteen-line lyric known as a sonnet—and remakes it to suit his purpose of startling the reader into a new understanding and into seeing reality in a new way. In this sonnet, Cummings portrays a group of people, “Cambridge ladies,” as representations of people who have money and a certain distinguished class in society but who lack the spontaneity and feeling that Cummings believes are the hallmarks of truly human beings. Cummings shows how these people from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of such prestigious institutions as Harvard University, are not what they appear to be.

In the first four lines, Cummings describes the ladies whom he is criticizing. They live in “furnished souls”—that is, their souls, as is the case with their lives, are assembled, readymade, and artificially arranged—and their minds are “unbeautiful” and “comfortable.” Furthermore, they live with the approval of the society around them, described as “the church’s protestant blessings,” which is an indication that they are both representative of their culture and held up as model citizens of this culture.

As he proceeds to describe the artificiality of the Cambridge ladies, Cummings notes that they believe in Christ and Longfellow, thus implying that they hold traditional beliefs in Christianity and art: in this instance, the art produced by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an American poet who lived from 1807 to 1882 and who was a professor of Romance languages at Harvard. Longfellow’s poetry, traditional in form and very American in its subject matter, suggests that these women are careful to read what is noncontroversial and nationalistic, two qualities Cummings abhors. Just as they believe in acceptable religion and art, these women are also involved in acceptable causes, described by Cummings as “knitting for the is it Poles?/ perhaps.”

Appearance is not reality, however, as Cummings goes on to demonstrate in the following lines. These Cambridge ladies are described as actually being gossipers who “coyly bandy/ scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D” and, worse, as people who, being caught up in their hypocritical posturing, neglect the beauty of nature around them. In the concluding lines, Cummings describes the moon above them as being “in its box of/ sky lavender and cornerless,” rattling “like a fragment of angry candy.” The knitting, gossiping ladies, being preoccupied with themselves, do not care to look up to see this natural phenomenon and, as a result, choose for themselves a lifeless, spiritless existence.

Forms and Devices

Innovation is E. E. Cummings’s hallmark, and this lyric embodies virtually all of his experimental efforts. Using a traditional verse form, the sonnet, as his structure, Cummings transforms the fourteen-line poem so that it is neither a Shakespearean nor a Petrarchan sonnet (the two types traditionally associated with this verse form). In the former, sometimes called English, three quatrains, each with a rhyme-scheme of its own, are followed by a rhyming couplet. In the latter, sometimes called Italian, the poem is divided into two sections, an octave and a sestet, each with its own particular rhyming pattern. Cummings uses only the basic structure of the traditional sonnet form—its fourteen lines—and discards virtually everything else, most obviously its disciplined rhyme schemes.

Another innovation Cummings introduces into his poetry is a wrenched syntax; that is, a sentence structure that does not follow the expected order of, for example, a subject followed by a verb or an adjective preceding a noun. Thus, the last four lines jumble the expected arrangement of words, forcing the reader to pause and reconstruct the lines to make meaning out of Cummings’s experimental arrangement:

…the Cambridge ladies do not care, aboveCambridge if sometimes in its box ofsky lavender and cornerless| Themoon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

By forcing this labor upon the reader, Cummings accomplishes one of his poetic purposes, which is to help the reader stop, look, and listen: stop a process of sometimes too-rapid reading, look at and listen to the words on the page, and reassemble those words so they reveal a new reality.

The reassembling process is a challenging one, especially since Cummings’s use (or lack) of punctuation does not reflect a traditional, grammatically correct approach to commas and other marks that might help a reader know when to stop and when to move forward in a poem. A series of adjectives is presented with no commas—“daughters, unscented shapeless spirited”—and a sentence might appear to end with a question mark but actually concludes with a period: “at the present writing one still finds/ delighted fingers knitting for is it the Poles?/ perhaps.” If the disregard for punctuation is one challenge, the disrespect for capitalization of letters is still another. Sometimes a sentence does not begin with a capital letter, such as the opening line of the poem, and sometimes it does, such as the last sentence of the poem (which does not conclude with a period). This sonnet, like Cummings’s other poems, does not allow for reading in the usual way or at the usual pace.

Just as he creates a new syntax and a new method of punctuation, so Cummings experiments with language, creating his own words and including unusual images. The Cambridge ladies are described as “unbeautiful,” one of many examples in Cummings’s poems of his use of the “un-” prefix to contrast a world he sees as ugly and artificial with its alternative world of beauty and spontaneity. His images, likewise, reveal these two worlds. The ladies in the poem, described as “unscented shapeless spirited,” occupy “furnished souls,” while the sky above them—which they never see—is “lavender and cornerless” and home to the moon, which is described with the simile, “like a fragment of angry candy.” Not only is this an unusual way to describe the moon, but it is also a startling way to end a sonnet. This is no neat conclusion to a sonnet, as a reader would expect in a traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. On the contrary, it is a typical Cummings conclusion, an assertion that endings are not artificially neat, like the lives of the Cambridge ladies, but are, instead, naturally unpredictable, like the moon rattling above the neglectful women.

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.

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