Trust Your Heart If The Seas Catch Fire By E. E Cummings

A mid-20th century poet famed for his avant-garde style of free verse poetry was a poet by the name of E.E. Cummings (commonly stylized as e.e. cummings). He was known for his disregard of grammatical norms; for example, proper capitalization and punctuation usage, and he would oftentimes combine multiple words into one, which gave his poetry its distinctive style. He also had an unusual way of formatting his poems, using line spacing atypical of what was commonly employed by other free verse poets of the day. His poems are generally short, witty musings on life, spirituality, nature, and women. They can also be deceptively simple, meaning that it seems like there might be a deeper meaning to the poem, but in reality they are just as simple as they look. This poem, dive for dreams, was published in Cummings’ 1958 collection titled 95 Poems. It is a poem that encourages others to follow their dreams and to live a life without regrets.
The first half of the first stanza says “dive
The first lines, “trust your heart/if the seas catch fire” is saying that you should follow your heart no matter what. The second half, “(and live by love/though the stars walk backward)”, is simply a repeat of the first half of the poem. Cummings wishes to drive home the point that you should always follow your heart. People are often symbolized as boats on the ocean, and the “sea” is often representative of life, so “the seas catch[ing] fire” is what it is like when life gets crazy or when it seems like everything is terrible and nothing is going your way. The “stars walk[ing] backward” has the connotation that everything is out of place and strange, since the stars never walk backward; they move in a set direction ever forward. Then again, it could also mean that the stars are aligning specifically for us, even if they have to walk backward to do