A stylistic analysis of the poem, “maggie and milly and moggy and may” By: E E Cummings

 

Introduction

There is no doubt in the fact that linguistics as an independent field and discipline, is rapidly growing day by day. Its rapid growth as an independent field of study and its accurate application to the literary study and criticism has opened new perspectives in the field of criticism especially in the twentieth century.

According to the dictionary definition of Stylistics, it means “the science of literary style” and “the art of forming good style in writing”

Stylistics, as a scientific discipline, not only critically analyze the text for the purpose of its understanding, but also scrutinizes and identifies different aspects of the language used and make it easy for the readers to fully understand and interpret it. This feature of stylistics brings it closer to practical criticism. Stylistics plays an important role in the reader response theory and reception theory as well. There would hardly be any field of critical approach where stylistics won’t have an impact on that field or a role to play there.

Apart from Linguistic tools of modern criticism and linguistic insights, Stylistics also gives an objective analysis of the text and provides with useful and meaningful insights about the language used in that text.

With these characteristics of objective analysis, linguistics makes it possible for us to fully interpret a text using stylistic devices and techniques, in order to enjoy any literature. This way, the importance of stylistics cannot be ignored by any student or academia.

Now as it is clear to us that the linguistic analysis of the language of literature is stylistics. The term ‘style’ is somehow misleading for many. As the word ‘style’ was attributed once with the language varieties, for example religious language, academic language, legal language, etc. but now, both these varieties are called registers. Also, both have somehow gained a specialized, but narrow employment of linguistics which is being applied to literature.  So the importance of stylistics in literary texts is many folded and cannot be ignored at all.

Introduction to the poet:

Edward Estlin Cummings, usually written as e e Cummings, was an American poet, essayist, painter, author, and playwright. He born in October 14, 1894, in Massachusetts, United States and died at September 3, 1962. He has written more than a hundred books. His famous works are ‘The Enormous Room’, ‘Tulips and Chimneys, and his ‘selected poems’.

e e Cummings was truly believed to be the representative of the American modern experimental poets. e e Cummings is widely known for his own unique style of writing and manipulating the language for his own sake. Some critics have remarked about Cummings’ style that “chewing the conventional rhymes and syntactic structure of poems and even rejecting to transfer information and emotion in the way of conventional printing. In other words, He has his own method of writing poetry and has special peculiarities in handling language in his own way”.

 

 

Text of the poem:

 maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

 

Linguistic Analysis of the poem:

 

If we look at the Rhyme Scheme of the poem, we see that it is like this

AABCDDEFGGHH

Furthermore there is a breakdown of the particular Rhyme Scheme of the poem between the lines (3-4) and 9(7-8) of the poem. Also, a kind of parallelism is being found between the lines (3-7) and (4-8) of the poem. These lines are ending with (troubles, and---bubbles, and).

 

Now the poem has been analyzed in the following lines using the foregrounding techniques:

1. Analysis at the Phonological level:

As it seems that the poem’s Rhyme is of nursery level as it is written for the children, so the use of alliterations are widely found in the poem. Alliteration is used for the purpose of rhythm and music. The following are used in the poems:

1.      maggie and milly and moggy and may

2.      so sweetly

3.      stranded star

4.      five languid fingers

5.      blowing bubbles

6.      a smooth round stone

The examples of rhyme, end rhyme, and internal rhyme are there at the phonological level:

(may-day), (stone-alone), me-sea) etc.

The basic foot that is being used in this foot is Iamb, along with some changes and variations

The patterns of the stress and unstressed syllables are of ‘ictus’ (/) and ‘remiss’(x) style

             /    x        /   x       /        x       /

  maggie and milly and moggy and may

 

The repetition of ‘and’ is due to the production of a typical rhyme scheme usually found in the children’s poems.  1-2-9-3 is the number of syllables line wise.

The same number of syllables in almost every line has helped to form the rhyme of the poem, making the poem an outstanding nursery rhyme poem, suited for children.

2. Analysis at the Morphological level:

The vocabulary used in the poem has been taken mostly used in the language of the children. The words are selected from the day to day use of the children. For example the words that is of more attraction to the kids or the jargons that are mostly related to children’s games and toys etc. the purpose of using such words is to evoke a certain phenomenon which is mostly related to the word of children. For example these following words create a certain kind of realm that is related to children.

“Beach – sea – stranded – star – shell – sing – horrible thing – round stone – bubbles – blowing- Sang-not remember troubles, befriended- chased.”

Similarly the repetition of the word ‘and’ in the first line of the poem distinguishes the four characters and also creates some sort of separate realms for these characters; hence it also groups them in a certain way. Where those specific words are creating an atmosphere say a beach where the kids are playing and helping each other simultaneously.

3. Analysis at the Syntactic level:

The graph logical deviation is there in line 11 “like a you or me”, (personal pronouns are the head of noun phrases), and similarly there is a deviation in the line “As small as a world and as long as alone” where the word ‘alone’ is used for the sake of comparison. Also, there is a dislocation in the line “Whose rays five languid fingers were”. Also it is worth noticing that some of these lines are embedded in the parenthesis, like (to play one day) etc, or the use of indefinite article ‘a’ as a modifier in the line “like a you or me” as to mean “a you or a me”.

 

Examples of parallel structure in the poem are:

1. maggie discovered a shell                         S.V.O

2. milly befriended a stranded star                S.V.O

3. we loose                                                     S.V

4. we find                                                       S.V

 

4. Analysis at the Graphological level:

One of the most important aspects of Cummings’ poetry is the aspect of Capitalization. Although he is famous for his deviant form of writing poetry, hence he does so by violation most of the structure of capitalization and punctuations. He simply does not care for the capitalization of certain words like he writes proper nouns (including his own name) in all small letters, or putting or even not putting a single punctuation even if needed. Here in this poem too, he has neglected the need of capitalizing the proper nouns like maggie, molly, milly etc and didn’t start his sentences with a capital letter.

So these and other untold aspects of the poem, like the use of figurative language etc, were some of aspects of linguistics used by the poet in the poem that were analyzed in most easy way, in order to fully grasp the linguistic notions used in the poem and to understand the poem lucidly.