All in green went my love riding Essay Questions

How does Cummings explore the notion of time in “All in green went my love riding”?

“All in green…” challenges our common perceptions of time. First of all, Cummings joins the past and present through his references to older literary traditions. The allusions to characters and landscapes in Roman mythology, the parody of medieval love ballads, the incorporation of older syntactical forms, and the borrowing of longstanding literary archetypes, evoke earlier moments in the history of literature. Cummings, a modernist and experimentalist, does not simply replicate these elements, but adds his “modern” developments to them. He tweaks the ballad form using spondees, trochees, sudden interjections of tetrasyllabic lines, and so on. He plays with perspectives, as modernists often do, and incorporates irony into the ending. He does not even assign a specific gender to the Diana figure, according to some Cummings scholars.

It is not only this poem’s relationship with earlier texts, but also its language, that complicates the sense of time in this narrative. The events must be taking place in the past (“All in green wentmy love riding”) but the descriptions render the sensations in this poem very visceral and immediate (“Paler be they than daunting death / the sleek slim deer / the tall tense deer.”). The word “before” can mean both spatial immediacy and temporal detachment. Thus, at both macro- and microscopic levels, this poem engages with the notion of temporality in ways that complicate our common, linear conception of time.

How are love and violence, or love and death, intertwined in this poem?

Love and violence have a very close relationship in “All in green went my love riding,” as the state of being in a romantic relationship is compared to the act of hunting. The death of the speaker can be interpreted in multiple ways: We may read it as the experience of love overwhelming the speaker, or as the experience of rejection destroying the speaker emotionally. In the former case, the arrow that kills the speaker is that of Cupid, and it is romance itself that is characterized as a violent experience. In the latter case, the act of rejecting someone’s affection is equated to the sadistic act of pursuing, shooting, and killing a wild animal. This sadism, though, is aestheticized in the beautiful descriptions of the hunt scene and the landscapes traveled by the hunter—thus love is an experience that is both pleasurable and painful.

Physical death, then, is compared to the emotional consequences of rejection. The moment when the speaker is shot in the heart is also the moment when the speaker reappears and disappears in the poem. Love, in this sense, both allows the speaker to realize his own existence, and causes this existence to perish. “All in green…” thus compares the destruction of the physical self in death to the destruction of the psychological self in tragic romance.

What is the role of colors in this poem?

Different colors represent different actors in the narrative of this poem. The color green, as signified in the title, is a symbol of the hunter, the lover, and furthermore, the force of nature. The green hunter, conqueror of the green mountain, is the victor in both the game of hunting and that of romance. It seems to be a consequence of natural law that the speaker’s beloved breaks the speaker’s heart, that the hunter shoots down the deer, and that the strong destroy the weak. Red, a complementary color of green, stands for the victims—the deer, the speaker, the rejected lover. The red of the deer mirrors the red of the blood that is shed at the end of the poem. The contrast between red and green thus illustrates the power imbalance central to the narrative of this poem.

Color also functions in establishing the setting of this poem. The silver dawn and golden horse together render the hunter godlike and the outdoors mythical. The white water and golden valley, too, contribute to the mythological aesthetics of this poem.

Why is it important that the speaker conceals his identity until the very end?

The situational irony of this poem—that the speaker a deer and that the deer is shot dead by the hunter—perhaps makes the modernist argument about the limited nature of our individual perspectives. We see the hunter, the animals, and the landscapes through the speaker’s eyes, without knowing that these are in fact the eyes of a deer. Our perception of the entire hunt scene is altered as a result of the ending, and we must go back to perform a “reverse engineering” of the scenes that build up to the final stanza. That the speaker is taking the perspective of a deer also tests the limits of narration — Cummings implies that the speaker of a poem can inhibit the voice of anyone and anything, and even that of an animal, for that matter. Thus, by revealing the speaker’s identity only at its very end, this poem challenges our perceptions of poetic voice and perspective.

How do form and content mirror each other in this poem?

From beginning to end, the form of the poem approximates the content, and vice versa. Repetition, for instance, highlights the psychedelic content of the poem. By repeating the same sentence structures and the same ordering of triplets and couplets, the poem throws its reader into a trance, like a song played on repeat. The “dappled dream” perhaps refers to this dreamlike quality of the repetitions. “All in green…” captures images and sensations that seem surreal, and the structure of the poem accentuates these surreal moments.

The abrupt ending of the poem imitates the abrupt death of the speaker. When it feels as though there should be two additional stanzas, the poem cuts to a blackout. The speaker’s love affair, too, terminates unexpectedly and violently with the rejection. The ending of the poem is a moment in which both the form and content evoke a sense of loss.