e.e. cummings Is Good Medicine

Now begins the month of May, so full of the joy of re-emerging life and love, the time when I think of e. e. cummings' poems.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This contrasts greatly with everything I was taught at university. I can remember my first course in English literature, at McGill University, the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Learning, then very much British, in Montreal as I young man. I was just starting out on the great adventure and exploration of “higher education,” and was given the following T. S. Eliot line by my serious, highly-qualified, trusted, highly-honored and paid professor:

       “April is the cruelest month.”

Such great insight, such penetration right into the essence of Spring! It was considered important, great literature. And wisdom. April is the cruelest month. Then we had to read Eliot's “The Wasteland” and “Murder in the Cathedral,” and to ferret out all the obscure allusions.

That poetry, that higher education, that tradition, was pure poison - or a disease. It nearly killed me. I now hold, however, that being given that poison or disease when I was young required of me, through reflection and later life experience, to understand how deeply corrupt the establishment is. It was necessary either to overcome it through understanding or to die, and, surprisingly I didn't die. I did die, in the sense that cummings refers to it above - but “i who have died am alive again today and this is the sun's birthday...”

e.e. cummings was Good Medicine, my best medicine.