Guest poem sent in by Pranesh Prakash , in yet another take on the flight theme:
Comments: This is a poem I immediately thought of when I saw the theme "flight". It is about the flight of a leaf as it is falling down from a tree. When read together without the line-breaks, it turns out to be l(a leaf falls)oneliness. It links up the falling of a lone leaf (note the emphasis on "1" (the numeral one) in the first line, as also the "one" in l"one"liness) to the emotion of loneliness. The most beautiful part of this poem is the way it is structured, which to me seems to resemble the passage of a leaf through various points of time from the half-horizontal "l(a" of the leaf on the tree, to the side-view of "ll" when it is in mid-air to the final full-horizontal of "iness". If you don't see that leaf falling, perhaps instead you see a large "L" in the shape of the poem, or perhaps a large "1" (with a line underneath: think of 1 in "Courier" instead of in "Arial".) The imagery that Cummings manages to evoke by saying so little is just beautiful. And this is actually a poem where the reason for abrupt and seemingly random line-breaks is clear (though with different clarity to each person) after some thought, and goes on to be really appreciated. The poem is all the more beautiful for the way the words are broken up. Pranesh [Links] Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings Here's an excellent essay on Cummings's use of typography and line breaks as a poetic element: http://www.cyberessays.com/English/104.htm And, since it appears to be a perennial misconception, an explanation of why it is not "e. e. cummings": http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/caps.htm
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