Yay Poetry!

Upon researching many poems, I have found that I do have a soft spot in my heart for most poetry.  For many years I have been obsessed with writing poetry that I never thought of looking up published poetry for any inspiration.  I recently found a poem by e.e. cummings entitled “my father moved through dooms of love,” which is my latest target to understand and annotate.  When I first read the beginning stanza, I believed the poem to be something of a pleasant story about the speaker’s father, but after reading through the rest of the poem I became confused.  Each stanza seems to create its own story and emotion, yet the stanza’s all connect to create one confusing poem.  When I annotate this, I will make sure to pay special attention to the shifts in tone from one stanza to the next and will try to find what the speaker is trying to say about his father.  One key point that I have been thinking about is that maybe the poem is meant to be this cataclysmic mess of emotions because that is how a typical family is; there are hugs, punches, smiles, and tears yet in the end the family still remains together.  Each of the stanzas could represent a different emotion that the father has brought upon the speaker, yet when all of the stanzas are combined, they make a typical father and child relationship.  This may be completely wrong since in the end I do not actually know what e.e. cummings actually wanted to say, but I can guess that the relationship between the speaker and the son is one with many ups and downs.  The contradicting characterization the father of happy yet sad and praised yet feared seems to be summed up into one stanza, when the poem explains that he is “giving to steal and cruel kind,/a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,/to differ a disease of same,/conform the pinnacle of am.”  The description of the father explains that he is one huge contradiction.  He is “giving to steal” and “cruel kind,” meaning that he is good yet evil.  This description of the father leads me to believe that the speaker is unreliable or a child, since a child goes through a roller coaster of emotions towards their parents.  At this point the child is not sure whether the father is looking out for him or purposely being evil, so the child’s brain is not sure what to think.  When a child gets older, however, he or she realizes that whatever the father is doing is most likely in the best interest of the child, and accepts that the father is only looking out for him or her.  At a young age, children cannot comprehend that what they want may not be what is best for them, and therefore feel as if the father is cruel.  The speaker may not in fact be a child, but I perceive the poem to be spoken by an irrational person, also known as a child.