Movement Background: Modernist poetry often is difficult for students to analyze and understand. A primary reason students feel a bit disoriented when reading a modernist poem is that the speaker himself is uncertain about his or her own ontological bearings. Indeed, the speaker of modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the fundamental question of “self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated from the world around him. In other words, a coherent speaker with a clear sense of himself/herself is hard to find in modernist poetry, often leaving students confused and “lost.” Such ontological feelings of fragmentation and alienation, which often led to a more pessimistic and bleak outlook on life as manifested in representative modernist poems such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” were prompted by fundamental and far-reaching historical, social, cultural, and economic changes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The rise of cities; profound technological changes in transportation, architecture, and engineering; a rising population that engendered crowds and chaos in public spaces; and a growing sense of mass markets often made individuals feel less individual and more alienated, fragmented, and at a loss in their daily worlds. World War I (WWI), moreover, contributed to a more modern local and world view.
Poetry Analysis: W Viva 1931 Cumming writes the poem that opens with "somewhere I have traveled", so I think he is about to go on a journey of love and he is also happy to go on that journey. The author talks about how he wants to treat her and protect her. He also mentions that how easily he opens open up to her. He states that, "your slightest look easily will unclose me." This quote shows that he is able to open up to her and how powerless he feels when he look into her eyes. When the author uses fragility, he equaling her to being fragile so you have to handle her with care. I believe the poem is also about love, but how its controlling it is and is hard to bear and like in nature there is great beauty but causes great harm. He states, "you open always petal by petal..", this is a controlling force just like the seasons controls the flowers.
Literary Devices: The poem have one literary device I want to get into. The literary device is personification. It is mentioned when the author states, "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." The author uses to show nothing can open up him and compare to the woman and not even the rain is as fragile and as beautiful as her hands, the hands used to open up his heart.