When I first read the title of this poem I was very confused. The title itself “[as freedom is a breakfastfood] did not make much sense to me on its own. Even in the context of the poem I still struggle to grasp its exact meaning. However the poem as a whole does have a lot of unique things I was able to pick up on and notice. One of the first things that I noticed when reading the poem was. No capitalization and no periods. There being four stanzas is the only thing that seems to break this passage up. Outside of that it feels and reads like a bigger blob.
As far as the detail within the text you see this theme of contrasting things being placed together throughout the whole poem. For example, “water” and “flame” to “courage” and “fear” and even “seeing’ and “blind”. Those words serve as descriptive symbols along with many other contrasting phrases. It seems as if you have to dig really deep or even sort of “reach” for a true meaning of what Cummings is saying. Some of the phrases that come off as clearly contrasting at first seem to have a sliver of meaning that groups them together and not against each other. I tried to break down some of the phrases on their own and I’m not sure how much of a reach this is but the shoe seems to fit in some way. In the third stanza when cummings writes, “the seeing are the blind” I kind of got this idea of cummings saying that the ones who seem to know what’s going on or even the ones that have everything in front of them seem to evidently be blind and not know anything. In the first stanza Cummings speaks to the fact that, “water most encourages flame” the idea that something such as water which is commonly used to kill a fire is portrayed as an encouragement of a flame is unique. However I think it’s unique that there are instances where water does not kill a flame. One example that comes to mind is a grease fire. In the event of a grease fire, water does indeed encourage the flame. I thought that was unique because it shows that even though the overwhelming majority of the phrases in here seem like opposites there seems to be a way in which many of them really aren’t. I just cannot figure out how some of the contrasting phrases are connected with each other.
The other unique parts in the poem serve a unique purpose in my opinion. You can see the phrase “-long enough and just so long” Sprinkled throughout the poem. Its placement serves a unique role as it is moved around to a different spot in each stanza. It takes the fourth line in the first stanza, fifth line in the second stanza and sixth line in the 3rd stanza. A downward shift of that phrase from stanza to stanza is capped off by it being completely left out in the last stanza. Now why is that? Why is it left out of the last stanza, I’m not sure myself.
Now I think overall there are two ways you can look at this poem and i’m truly stuck between which one is true.
Option 1: This poem is a big blob of nonsense that EE Cummings left for us to make sense of. The beauty of the poem would be that because there is no true meaning left by cummings. All the power belongs to whoever reads the poem. It gives them some sense of “freedom’ when reading the poem.
Option 2: There is a meaning but Cummings wrote this poem in such a unique way that its hard to grasp.
I would prefer to go with option 2 because my heart feels empty without a true meaning behind this poem.
So going on that, I think the poem is a huge metaphor for the idea that things just aren’t always the way that they seem. I wish I had a more specific idea on what it is about but I truly don’t have much. I know that this is a mid 1900s poem and I wonder if this has anything to do with any of the world wars or the great depression. There are no glaring indicators that point that out to me. Possibly the word “Freedom” and the connection that it has to war so if I had to go with a connection to the text, I would connect it to war but I still don’t feel very sure in doing that.