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I Sing Of Olaf Glad And Big Poem Analysis

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I Sing Of Olaf Glad And Big Poem Analysis
In, “i sing of Olaf glad and big” Cummings once again calls attention to the unusual syntax and uses many of the writing tools available to him. For instance, in the very first line of the selected text of the poem, Cummings writes “his wellbelovéd colonel(trig/westpointer most succinctly bred)” (1-2). In this sentence alone, one sees several examples of Cumming’s ability to manipulate syntax to better represent the flow and other needs of his poems. When cummings writes “wellbelovéd” he purposely uses the accented “é” to get our minds to make the sound, which then rhymes better with “bred”, and also gives more of an accent to the whole tone of the poem, as though someone were reciting it in song, as the title suggests. This also can be seen …show more content…
Cummings effectively makes this poem into a song through clever uses of punctuation and flair, which help the song flow like a song should in parts . For instance, when he uses the accented ‘é’ in “wellbelovéd”, it adds a subconscious musical note to the rhythm of the piece. Furthermore, the lines “straightway the silver bird looked grave/(departing hurriedly to shave)” (17-18) provides another example of Cummings’ ability to create a song out of a poem. An example of a more traditional flow in this poem is when he writes “Olaf(upon what were once knees)/does almost ceaselessly repeat/“there is some shit I will not eat”” (28-39), which contains too many syllables to fit into a conventional song’s rhythm, so these lines are interpreted as a poem rather than a song. The entirety of this poem is written in an unusual form of meter called iambic tetrameter. This meter has a very strict pattern, which Cummings uses to represent the strictness of military orders, and. Furthermore, most of the time when Cummmings uses parentheses, it is to represent a side note, which is typically difficult to do in a song, since a lengthy tangent can disrupt the flow, as “Olaf(being to all intents/a corpse and wanting any rag/upon what God unto him gave)” (12-14) does in this particular

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