Unlock Hidden Meanings: Transform Your Poems with This Surprising Wordplay Exercise
children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
Cummings also played with grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The lack of spacing around the parenthesis is not a typo!
Poetic Language
Let’s look more closely at the phrase “down they forgot as up they grew.”
It’s not a conventional way to arrange words. Cummings flouted conventional syntax with the word order (“up they grew” instead of “they grew up”), and he combined words in surprising ways (“down they forgot”).
We know that according to the rules of our language, this excerpt shouldn’t make sense, especially the notion of “forgetting down,” yet as we read the lines of the poem, we know exactly what the poet is saying.
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