Spring is like a perhaps hand

Any examination of Cummings’s “Spring is like a perhaps hand” would be incomplete without mentioning nature. Despite the poem’s formal innovation and subversion of typical simile structure, it is still—at its core—a nature poem. Like many poets before him, Cummings composes a reflection on the coming of spring and the impact and importance of nature to the imagination.

“Spring is like a perhaps hand” illustrates a natural world characterized by care, artistry, and possibility. Spring—and, by extension, nature as a whole—seem to appear “out of Nowhere” (Line 3), and yet it “chang[es] everything” (Line 9). E.E. Cummings anthropomorphizes nature, meaning he gives it human characteristics. In Cummings’s poem, nature has both intention and precision. The poem does not give nature’s acts motivation or explanation, but implies an instinctive or primordial force. However, the care and hesitation— “[spring] mov[es] a perhaps / fraction of flower” (Lines 16 – 17)—imply a kind of mind behind nature’s actions.

Cummings’s poem creates a portrait of nature as both primordial and careful, inevitable and artful. While spring may “come[ ] carefully / out of Nowhere” to do its unstoppable work, it performs this work with the intention and subtlety of a single hand changing a window arrangement. Crucial to the poem, this work is done “without breaking anything” (Line 19). Nature may be a force of change, but it is a careful one and—in this poem of Cummings’s—not destructive.

While the dominant “character” in the poem is undeniably spring, the similes which describe it are filled with observers. The inseparability of nature’s changes and the people who witness them express Cummings’s understanding of humanity’s relationship to nature. The people in the poem “look” (Line 4) and “stare” (Line 5) at spring’s changes—they do not participate in the changes themselves. The dominant image of the poem—spring’s changes as a hand shifting a window arrangement—place a pane of glass between the actions of nature and its observers. Cummings presents an understanding of nature as separate from humanity. We may watch and react, but we may not change or contribute to nature’s “[careful] changing placing” (Line 6).

In the second large stanza, the people in the image “stare carefully” (Line 15). The adverb “carefully” describes the onlookers only in part, as the line-break allows it to modify both “stare” and “moving” (Lines 15-16). However, it does show a similarity between the previously separate human observers and nature. Like the collapse of tenor and vehicle into one another and the merging of primary sentence and parenthetical, the second full-size stanza also blurs the line between humanity and nature. Although Cummings never allows for a departure from anything more than voyeurism in terms of human participation in nature, the quality of nature is mirrored in its observers. This concession is slight, but it shows a relationship between observer and observed.