For Most This Amazing Day
Lyrics sung by voices in unison may be difficult to discern, but I recognised this choral piece as Eric Whitacre’s, drawing in turn on the poetry of E. E. Cummings.[2] The words quivered with “life and of love and wings,” while the “blue true sky” beckoned toward greater wonders. Despite having had an arduous week I found myself worshipping.
Cummings was more than a poet; he was an artist and storyteller, a contemporary of literati like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom experimented with radical new forms of writing: its syntax, punctuation, spelling, and layout. Cummings’ relish for breaking rules attracted a ready audience in post-war America where his poetry, renowned for its wit and natural themes, also explored sexual matters. His work was certainly raw at times.
[H]e used whatever strategies of role-playing he felt necessary in order to keep himself productive - petit garcon, idealizing lover, scourge of conformity, a worshiper of nature, judicious elder, or irascible old crank.[3]
Cummings could be alternately entertaining and curmudgeonly. The general sunniness of i thank You God sets it apart from many of Cummings’ other poems, and while we cannot be completely sure he is not just playing us along, he leaves enough clues to serious thought beneath the teasing veneer of his work.
Apart from references to classical Greek mythology, one might even consider i thank You God a Christian work. Whether by quoting Holy Scripture, or by the artist professing Christianity, it is worth reflecting on what makes a work of art “Christian,” or not. But to evaluate artwork this way is not all that simple. The rubrics for the robust appraisal of art require more from us since using “Christian” as a category tends to polarise people to the point that the quest for beauty, hope, and even God himself, may be lost. So, what is this author’s real inspiration, and where is his destination? What truth claims are being made, or is the artist simply toying with words? My hope here is to critique Cummings’ poem while also finding it a source of inspiration.
Cummings’ fondness for changing word order upsets our reading pace. He forces us to slow down and to consider his possible reasons for doing this, so for example, is the merely being of “human merely being” his intended focus? Why does the more usual phrase “merely human being” not suffice? Such small tweaks may have profound implications.
“Spirits of trees” and the “dream of sky,” suggests a world in which the union of earth goddess (Gaia) and the sky god (Uranus) was supposed to have produced a mythical race of Titans.[4] While this would appear to embrace paganism or elements of New Age thinking, another point of view would boldly assert Jesus as creator-sustainer of all life (Col 1:16-17).[5] It very much depends on the framework within which one places the text.
Take “birthday,” split into “birth” / “day” (especially spanning separate lines) and note how this emphasizes two independent significances. Birth events are universally hallowed. Ordinary days can be boringly routine. Could separating absolute beginnings from repetitive daily restarts perhaps bring out the specialness in either? In fact, birth/renewal are dominant themes in this poem; rebirth/spiritual awakening is also present just under the surface. The poet then amplifies “the birth / day of life …” and adds “illimitable earth” to shift this whole poem into a cosmic ecosystem.
Something tremendous, some “unimaginable you,” is in view as Cummings reviews his list of human senses. “Tasting touching hearing seeing” when run together, without punctuation, form a gesture of almost breathless wonder. Cummings adds his own further touch by replacing “smelling” with “breathing,” as though the breath of life were more significant than scientific correctness. As regards humans, the poem makes breath a matter of life and death both literally and figuratively.
Cummings’ allusions to blindness and deafness (from which he evidently recovers) makes me think especially of awakening and of enlightenment, and the phrases “illimitably earth” and “blue true dream of sky” arouse in me certain strong associations. The first is Moses (with his leadership team) on Mount Sinai seeing Yahweh as through a sapphire blue pavement (Exod 24:9-11.) Post Resurrection, the second is Jesus ascending into the heavens and the crucial place in Christian theology this holds. “Blue true dream” is just that; surreal, surprising, and revelatory. It is semi-consciously perceived and spiritual in content.
So, whether informed by his studies in Classical Greek, or by Holy Scripture, Cummings’ expansive vision connects the heavens above with the earth below, finite with infinite, nature with supernature, and all are strong features of this poem.
Finally, Cummings’ closing lines would seem to refer to Isaiah 35:5. Indeed on several occasions the prophet Isaiah mentions ears and eyes in various contexts,[6] an analogue of Israel’s persistent struggle with idolatry. Not only does he expose the nonsense of unseeing and unhearing gods, but he also underlines its offensiveness to Yahweh. In that context especially King Hezekiah’s great prayer, with even the suggestion that Yahweh might be deaf as well as blind, sounds rather ironic - “incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord and see …” (Isa 37:17, 2 Kgs 19:16, cf. Isa 1:15). Yet we should never lose sight of Yahweh’s much deeper and enveloping story of mercy and grace.
In addition, any anthropomorphic attribution of ears and eyes to God, who is spirit, demonstrates certain limitations of human language which I find very interesting. Cummings’ epiphany, the awakening of his own ears and eyes from the symbolic stupor of sleep also seems to struggle to find adequate expression. Limited expression is not, however, just an affliction of poetry or philosophy. John Polkinghorne, a physicist turned priest, writes of a cousinly relationship between quantum physics and theology as “a profoundly subtle account of a deep and unexpected reality.”[7] Their independent quests for truth, believes Polkinghorne, follow parallel lines of enquiry, each running out of suitable terminology to adequately describe either Creation, or God.
I am uncomfortable with how quickly I have moved from decoding the poet, to responding to his words. This article self-consciously follows in the footsteps of reader-response criticism[8] where at its most naïve the reader brings his/her own thoughts and experiences to the text. Such criticism, unhelpfully, tends to displace the text’s author, but I hope to have contributed here to its rehabilitation.
Respecting Cummings the Harvard classics graduate, and certainly being aware of his formation as the son of a Unitarian minister, I enjoy his poetic craftsmanship[9] without necessarily accepting non-Trinitarian theology or pantheistic views of nature. His words open bright new worlds of meaning for me. Those clever interruptions, that playfulness with words. His word rearrangements in particular, form a powerful axis upon which my thoughts turn as they nimbly connect me with similar themes in Scripture. And that Scripture infuses eternal life through the Holy Spirit, as portrayed in the post-Easter story of Jesus breathing upon his disciples (John 20:22), noting there as well, the story’s close association with Thomas and his own revelation of the risen Christ.
When I heard Whitacre’s choral setting of Cumming’s poem in my car on that day, I had the strongest sense that, over and above its sonic beauty and its intricate lyrics, God was speaking to me in a dialect which sounded strangely familiar.
Peter Jelleyman graduated from Laidlaw College in 2012 with a BTheol. He currently works as a broadcast technician for Rhema Media in Auckland, enjoys poetry and music, and is particularly interested in what musicians are saying and how they are saying it. Peter blogs in his spare time and relishes any occasion in which can explore the sonic world of musical synthesizers.
[1] For a great rendition of this musical piece, see Universal Music Group Whitacre: Three Songs Of Faith: I Than You God For Most This Amazing Day https://youtu.be/M4D58yXLWro. Try to listen with the best headphones you possess.
Lyrics “i thank You God for most this amazing day,” Genius, https://genius.com/Eric-whitacre-i-thank-you-god-for-most-this-amazing-day-lyrics
And for a recording of E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) reading his poem "i thank You God for most this amazing" from his book "XAIPE." https://youtu.be/axH9A28CTjw
[2] A short biography of E. E. Cummings, Encyclopaedia of World Biography, https://www.notablebiographies.com/Co-Da/Cummings-E-E.html.
[3] Kennedy and Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings, 1st ed. (New York: Liveright Pub. Corp, 1980), 486.
[4] Uranus: Greek Mythology, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Uranus-mythology.
[5] John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 109.
[6] Isa 1:15, 5:21, 11:3, 22:14, 29:10, 30:21, 32:3, 35:5, 43:8, 59:1 (to cite but a few)
[7] Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics, 59.
[8] Reader response criticism may be traced back to the hermeneutic of Hans Georg Gadamer in which the reader enters into “conversation” with a work of art. “The artwork, no matter what its medium, opens up, through its symbolic character, a space in which both the world, and our own being in the world, are brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality.” “5. Literature and Art” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#DiaPhr.
[9] An example of another of E. E. Cummings’ more pleasant poems, try “Anyone Lived in a How Now Town”, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22653/anyone-lived-in-a-pretty-how-town.