Poetry

Line 1

Here the speaker of the poem introduces the four characters. Notice how the repetition of the "m" sound in each of the girls' names gives this line a musical quality, like a melody, and makes it sound like a nursery rhyme. Such repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of words is called alliteration and serves to create among each of the alliterated words an especially musical relationship. In essence, each of the girls' names shares this "m" quality, and it is implied, at least on some level, that each of the girls is the same or similar. The names blend together and do not distinguish themselves from one another, and each girl's character and personality is similarly undistinguished. cummings commonly took liberties with basic stylistic conventions and does so here with each of the characters' names, which he does not capitalize. Capitalization is traditionally used to denote proper names and to signify respect for the individual, it is arguable that by not capitalizing names here cummings is suggesting that each character is not wholly an individual. Nevertheless, the rest of the poem, as the reader will see, serves to distinguish each of the characters from one another and to give the reader a clearer picture of how they are each individual and unique.

Line 2

This line then sets the scene. The reader is told that all four of the characters have gone to the beach ostensibly to "play." Notice how cummings uses parentheses to set apart "to play one day." Parentheses traditionally serve to set apart information that is not vital to the central meaning of a sentence, and in this sense the speaker of the poem is telling the reader that the reasons why the girls went is not particularly important. More important, when one notes that the word "day" rhymes with "may" in the first line, one might argue that the parentheses serve to separate this ornament from the more important thematic material of the poem. In other words, the parentheses point out that the end of this line serves only to complete the poetic structure and that, in a sense, this poetic structure is not particularly important. This is important when one recognizes how the poem diverges almost completely from this rhyme scheme in later stanzas.

Lines 3–4

Here the reader learns that one of the characters, maggie, finds a shell while she is playing. As is done with shells, she places it to her ear and hears the sound it makes, the sound of the ocean. This sound is so pleasingly musical that she becomes engrossed and forgets herself and all her worries and "troubles." Notice how the word "troubles" does not rhyme with "sang" and thus disrupts the rhyme scheme begun in the couplet. The reader expects the speaker to tell him/her that maggie was so taken with the shell's song that "she couldn't remember her name." This would at least create a slant rhyme between "sang" and "name." Instead, having set up in the reader an expectation as to how the poem will play out, cummings diverges from the expected in order to upset the reader's sense of order. One expects the poem to continue its nursery-rhyme-like rhyme scheme, but instead cummings undercuts this expectation with impunity. One gets "troubles." The effect is that maggie, as an individual, is characterized not by her "name" but by her concerns and worries, by what she cares about. What these worries might concern is left un-said, but what one learns is that "playing" for maggie means getting away from such concerns and being enveloped in the sensory experience of the ocean and the beach: it means losing herself.

Lines 5–6

This couplet depicts the second character, milly, and describes what she finds while playing. Note that she "befriends" the star, presumably a starfish "stranded" on the beach at low tide. In other words, play for milly consists of finding and/or building friendships. In this case, however, the friend she finds, the star, has "five languid fingers." Languid means inert or sluggish or spiritless or lifeless, and it is implied that milly has struck up a friendship with a spiritless, lifeless creature. This then is presumably less than ideal, or at the very least one-sided. One could argue even that this suggests how desperate milly is for friendship and say that she herself is, in this sense, "languid." That is to say she is somehow lifeless or incapable of creating