This is the beginning of one of Mr. Cummings’ poems. The first obvious oddity is the degrading of the personal pronoun ‘I’ into ‘i’. This has a very simple history. The ‘upper case’ was in mediaeval times used for all nouns and proper names and the adjectives formed from them; for the Deity; for Royalty (in ‘We’ and ‘Our’); for certain quasi-divine abstractions such as Mystery, Power, Poetry; and sometimes for ‘She’ and ‘Thou’ and so on, where love gives the pronoun a quasi-divine character. Mr. Cummings protests against the upper case being also allotted to ‘I’: he affects a casualness, a humility, a denial of the idea of personal immortality responsible for ‘I’. Moreover ‘i’ is more detached: it dissociates the author from the speaker of the poem. This use of ‘i’ is in keeping with his use of the word ‘who’, instead of ‘which’, to qualify the roses; the roses become so personal as to deserve the personal rather than the neutral relative. His next idiosyncrasy is his refusal of a capital letter to each new line of the poem. Now, if this convention were not so ancient, it would seem as odd and unnecessary as, for instance, quotation-marks seem in eighteenth-century books enclosing each line of a long speech instead of occurring only at the beginning and end of a passage. The modernist rejection of the initial capital can be justified on the grounds that it gives the first word of each line, which may be a mere ‘and’ or ‘or’, an unnatural emphasis. If for special reasons the poet wishes to capitalize the first word, the fact that it is anyhow capitalized like all the other initial ‘And’s’ and ‘Or’s’ makes any such niceness impossible. Later in the poem Cummings uses the capital letter at the beginning of a new sentence to call attention to the full-stop which might otherwise be missed: but the ‘because’ at the beginning of the poem need not be capitalized because it obviously _is_ the beginning. Similarly, he has suppressed the conventional comma after ‘lady’ because the end of the line makes a natural pause without punctuation. Commas he uses to mark pauses, not merely as the geographical boundaries of a clause. He has even in another poem inserted one between the ‘n’ and ‘g’ of the word ‘falling’ to suggest the slowness of the falling. Colons and semicolons and full stops he uses to mark pauses of varying length. To give a longer pause still he will leave a blank line. In the quotation just given, the new line at ‘remembering’ is to mark a change of tone, though the pause is not longer than a semicolon’s worth. Parentheses he uses for _sotto voce_ pronunciation; or, if they occur in the middle of the word, as in “the taxi-man p(ee)ps his whistle”, they denote a certain quality of the letters enclosed--here the actual sharp whistling sound between the opening and closing (the two p’s) of the taxi-man’s lips. When this system is carried to a point of great accuracy we find lines like the following: