A 20th Century Love Poem

Woody Allen used this poem in Hannah and Her Sisters, and it turned up again recently in a BBC Series called The Hour. It was written by an American poet named Edward Estlin Cummings, a Bostonian who preferred to write his name as e. e. cummings. He published this poem in a collection called ViVa, which was published in 1931. Being a hip modern poet, he did not bother to give the poem a title -- or to follow the normal rules of capitalization. Once you get past these typographical oddities, however, you are left with a beautiful poem with some really spectacular images. I particularly like the part about the rain:


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if you wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands