Spring is like a perhaps hand

E.E. Cummings opens his untitled poem with the line “Spring is like a perhaps hand” (Line 1), a straightforward simile, aside from the curious usage of “perhaps.” The word “perhaps” functions in multiple ways. In one sense, “perhaps” may be read as a real-time corrective reflection by the speaker: Spring is like a—perhaps—hand. Because “perhaps” appears only after the article “a,” the caveat is infused with hesitation. The speaker begins their statement as a declaration, only to bisect the noun phrase with a marker of uncertainty. On this read, the “perhaps” functions like the speaker interrupting themselves mid-speech. However, the more dominant interpretation of the line (supported by later, more determinate repetitions of the device) sees “perhaps” used not as an adverb but an adjective. In this reading, “a perhaps hand” (Line 1) is a single, unbroken noun, where spring is compared to a hand of uncertainty, a hand which inquires into alternative possibilities of all it touches, a “perhaps-hand.”

When the reader has just had time to absorb these two meanings, layered on top of one another as they are, the poem interrupts its own thought once again—this time with a parenthetical statement. The statement describes the “hand,” noting both that it “comes carefully” and that it proceeds “out of Nowhere” (Lines 1-3). The interruption describes the hand as “careful [ ]” (Line 2) and echoes the adjectival reading of “perhaps” (Line 1), drawing out its hesitating gentleness. The continual interruption of care paints a picture of spring as bringing its changes with the very lightest of touches. The mid-line, mid-phrase capitalization of “Nowhere” (Line 3) is less extreme than it may seem at first—considering Cummings’s heavy use of the device across his oeuvre. However, it still places the word in the company of only a handful of others in the poem that receive this treatment. The words, “Nowhere” (Line 3), “Hand” (Line 11), “New and / Old” (Lines 13-14), and potentially the opening “Spring (Line 1) are all simple, almost archetypal concepts. Here, capitalization gives “Nowhere” the sense that it is somewhere, that it is the name of some specific place. This connotes a cosmic nowhere or no-place, like the void, abyss, or perhaps non-being. Whatever the implication, it adds an almost mythic gravitas to the otherwise innocuous phrase.

Once the parenthetical concludes, the poem continues to develop the image of the “perhaps hand” (Line 1). The hand “arrang[es] / a window” (Lines 3-4), recalling a shop window changing its display for a new season. The poem goes out of its way to include onlookers, describing the “window,into [sic] which people look” (Line 4) before immediately repeating itself in the parenthetical that follows, “(while / people stare […]” (Line 4-5). The position of the people watching is as outside onlookers only, presumably cut off from the changes inside the window by a pane of glass. While the repetition and the attentiveness of the onlookers injects human participants into the processes of nature and its seasonal changes, the image still cuts off humans from the changes themselves. Cummings is careful to emphasize that, while humans may observe and participate in the process of spring, their participation can only be passive. Any changes made by the perhaps-hand of spring are up to the season alone, and all people can do is observe.

The proximity of the two phrases, “people look(while / people stare”—in conjunction with the stand-out short line “people stare” (Lines 4-5) ending after only two words—creates a recursive secondary meaning. This echo acts almost like a reflection, recalling the pane of glass separating human observers from nature’s work. The abnormally short line break sets the phrase “people stare” more apart from its grammatical whole than it would be otherwise. This separation lets the line “arranging and changing placing” (Line 6) stand on its own, if only briefly, to embody the change-action which characterizes Cummings’s spring. The absence of a comma between the final two words helps this line cohere as a unit of meaning apart from its broader grammatical context.

The following line, on the other hand, again emphasizes the care and delicacy of the change-action of spring. Like the earlier “perhaps” (Line 1) and “carefully” (Line 2), the “carefully there a strange” of Line 7 draws extra grammatical attention to its “carefully,” this time by means of line breaks. This extra attention paints a picture of a spring which affects change with extraordinary care. With care, spring places both “strange” and “known thing[s]” (Line 8) here and there.

After grouping its first eight lines together into a single unbroken stanza, the poem departs from its typical form to introduce a stanza only one line long: “changing everything carefully” (Line 9). This line recalls how “arranging and changing placing” extended the poem’s repetition. Line 9 has its own stanza and receives special emphasis. This line shows the importance of the change-action of spring. It is worth noting that the grammar of the line communicates something of importance, the verb “changing” and the adverb “carefully” both communicating action. Since each is a modifying part of speech, the activity of spring rather than its essence is emphasized. The stanza is a three-word expression of activity and change without a definite object or subject.

The poem begins its next stanza by echoing the beginning of its first: “spring is like a perhaps” (Line 10). While “perhaps” was grammatically ambiguous in the poem’s first line, the position of the line break in the third stanza cements its use as part of a noun-phrase. The line break and capitalization of “Hand” in the fourth stanza allow for line 10 to exist on its own. The phrase “a perhaps” functions as a noun in its own right. The pause created by the line break emphasizes the “perhaps,” giving it noun-like status as it combines with “Hand,” almost as if the two words were hyphenated into perhaps-hand (Line 11). Emphasis and grammatical gymnastics continue to highlight the tenuous, gossamer delicacy of the changes which spring enacts.

The first line in the fourth stanza, “Hand in a window,” is an image in itself (Line 11). Read with the preceding line, the effect transforms: “spring is like a perhaps / Hand in a window” (Lines 10 – 11). The parenthetical phrase that follows highlights that the hand moves “carefully” (Line 12). Cummings continues to create multiple meanings by swapping parts of speech, or creating different syntaxes across the line and within the line. For instance, the line “people stare carefully” seems to apply the adverb to “people.” (Line 15). However, the following line uses “carefully” to modify the hand of spring: “carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower” (Lines 15-17). Like his capitalization of “Nowhere” (Line 3) in the opening stanza, Cummings capitalizes “New and / Old things” (Lines 13-14), infusing gravitas and significance.

For the first time in the poem, the objects arranged by the “perhaps hand” of spring are identified. With its onlookers attentive, spring’s arranging hand “mov[es] a perhaps / fraction of flower” (Lines 16-17) and “an inch of air” (Line 18). The revelation of these moved objects interacts with the original simile in Line 1. Metaphors and similes may be broken into two general parts: the tenor (or the original thing described) and the vehicle (or the thing to which the original is compared). In Cummings’s simile, “spring” (Line 10) is the tenor and the “perhaps / Hand in a window” (Lines 10-11), to which spring is compared, is the vehicle. A reader might expect the objects in the window to be average window display items. Instead, the hand arranges “an inch of air” and a “fraction of flower” (Lines 17-18). These objects are clear inhabitants of the world of the simile’s tenor—spring—they are what spring literally rearranges. The resulting image is of a window display made up of flowers and spring air. This blending of tenor and vehicle serves to both add coherence to the poem and complicate Cummings’s use of simile.

Cummings concludes the poem on another three-word, single-line stanza. Although the sounds of the words heavily echo the previous one-line stanza, the meaning is distinct. Here, it is not only spring’s changes which are highlighted, but the resulting lack of destruction: “[W]ithout breaking anything” (Line 19). This breaks the syntactical rules Cummings previously established in the poem.

If we remove all parenthetical statements and lineation from the poem, the poem reads as follows: “Spring is like a perhaps hand arranging a window,into [sic] which people look and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window and without breaking anything” (Lines 1-19). With the exception of punctuation, which is often implied by lineation, this is grammatically conventional until the end. The final “and” (Line 18) is superfluous and opaque—how is it adding to the final phrase? The only reasonable explanation to the deviation of “and / without breaking anything” to the poem’s earlier logic is that the division of meanings within and without the parentheses has begun to break down. The final clause makes sense if we read it as an addition to the end of Cummings’s final parenthetical: spring’s hand places “an inch of air there […] and / [does so] without breaking anything” (Lines 18-19).

In this way, Cummings has made the division between primary and parenthetical grammar porous in the same way he made the division between his simile’s tenor and vehicle porous. The two primary semantic devices the poem uses to impart meaning—parentheticals and similes—have coagulated into something like a whole by the end of the poem. Although these departures from the poem’s earlier structure are subtle, they are crucial to the poem’s meaning. The changes are as subtle and delicate as the changes which spring enacts, but they blossom into a distinct and whole meaning by the end—much like the careful work of spring utterly transforms nature.