Buy And Download Music Score I Thank You God For Most This Amazing Day, Eric Whitacre
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blueish true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is space which is aye
(i who take died am alive again today,
and this is the sun'south birthday;this is the birth
twenty-four hours of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
swell happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
animate whatsoever—lifted from the no
of all zip—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You lot?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the optics of my eyes are opened)
This poem was originally published in Xaipe one (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), reissued in 2004 by Liveright, an banner of W.W. Norton & Company. Reprinted here by permission of the publisher . Copyright expires 2045.
Edward Estlin Cummings (1894–1962), known as E. Due east. Cummings,2 is one of America's virtually famous twentieth-century poets. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was raised, a pastor's son, in the Unitarian faith, which emphasizes the oneness of God. As an adult he wednesday this spiritual framework to Emersonian transcendentalism, a philosophical motion that celebrates humanity and nature. Elements from these 2 complementary traditions can be detected in his praise poem "i thank You God for almost this amazing," in which the natural world triggers an enkindling to Truth. And for Cummings, Truth is a person, a "You" with a majuscule Y.
Humanities students are always introduced to Cummings as a poet, but actually, painting is the try he invested most of his time in.3 One of his favorite subjects to paint was the landscape surrounding his summer abode at Joy Farm in Silver Lake, New Hampshire (see image above). The elation he felt in this environment of wooded hills, fields, and lake he worked into several of his poems. I wonder if the phrases "leaping greenly spirits of trees" and "blueish truthful dream of heaven" were inspired by a view from his farmstead one Baronial mean solar day.
Cummings is notorious for his idiosyncratic poetic style, which is marked especially by anarchistic syntax—that is, a nonlogical ordering of words. This device is at play in the bad-mannered starting time line of our present poem, which dislocates "most": instead of "i give thanks You God for this most amazing / day" (this day is so amazing) or even "i thank You God nearly for this astonishing / day" (this twenty-four hours is what I'm most thankful for), nosotros take "i thank you God for most this amazing / twenty-four hours." Past inverting the discussion gild, Cummings draws attention to the word "nigh," traditionally an adverb but in this position an indeterminate lexical category.
He does this, too, in stanza three with "human simply beingness." He adds the suffix -ly to the adjective "mere" and places it correct in the center of an open up compound so that instead of "mere human beingness" we have a unique word combination that invites deeper idea. This syntactical shift converts the word "being" from a noun to a verb.
While some literary scholars have criticized the seemingly arbitrary arrangements of words in Cummings'southward poems, others have suggested that they encourage fresh perceptions. "The words, the meanings in the words, and likewise the nebula of meaning and sound and pun around the words, are all put into an enlivening relation to each other," writes R. P. Blackmur.iv
Cummings besides abased the rules of spacing, demonstrated here past his closing upwards the space subsequently each colon and semicolon. Whereas spaces would take visually signaled the end of a phrase, giving the eyes a blank to briefly relax into, Cummings chose instead to run one idea correct into the next. This lack of spacing evokes a sense of incoherent enthusiasm. In the tertiary stanza he does something similar, except instead of omitting the spaces after punctuation he omits the punctuation itself, in a list that would otherwise have commas: "tasting touching hearing seeing / animate."
Some other idiosyncrasy in Cummings'due south poetry is his partition of words across line breaks, as in the "nascence / twenty-four hour period" of this poem. These two words are typically conjoined in English language writing, and the fact that they occur earlier in the line every bit such (i.east., "altogether") only calls farther attention to them individually.
Birth is a major theme in this poem. "i who take died am alive again," writes Cummings equally himself. He experiences a spiritual awakening, "the birth / solar day of life and of dear and wings." To me, this line is the most evocative one in the verse form. I read into it my own experience of enkindling—that is, my conversion to Christianity, my being raised with Christ into new life. This isn't the same kind of awakening that Cummings is talking almost, who, existence Unitarian, rejected the divinity of Christ and the literalness of the Resurrection.5 His born-again feel seems to refer more than generally to a sudden, sweeping awareness of the glory of God, a wonder that lifts him upwards out of either ignorance or depression, as if on wings.
The idea that nature is a revelator of God shows up a lot in Cummings's oeuvre, simply not equally overtly as it does in "i cheers God for most this amazing." In its beauty, its complexity, and its vastness, nature testifies to its Creator. In stanza 3 Cummings expresses incredulity that, given this testimony, any homo existence should ever doubt God'due south beingness.
Every bit have all writers who have ever tried to write about God, Cummings struggled with how to articulate who he/she is. I love his 1-discussion descriptor: "aye." God is yes. This is the most positive, most affirmative give-and-take Cummings could find. "Yes" implies "true," "right," and is as well used to express excitement: Yes! The opposite of God is "the no / of all nothing." Those who do not live in awe and worship of God alive in this state of no—emptiness, meaninglessness, exclusion from blessing.
Cummings'south encounters with divine majesty humbled him, an mental attitude he expresses here in 2 ways. Commencement, he lowercases first-person pronouns only capitalizes those referring to God. This stylistic choice visually contrasts the smallness of humanity with the largeness of God—a contrast he also builds with the words "merely" and "illimitably." Second, he sets off the accounts of his personal awakening in parentheses as if they are merely asides, minor addresses to the reader rather than to God. The relegation of these comments to side notes keeps God, the verse form's main subject, elevated.
The final stanza, one of those 2 asides, uses the phrases "ears of my ears" and "eyes of my optics," suggesting a spiritual hearing and seeing, a sense beyond the physical. It is with that sense that nosotros perceive God—not by hearing his physical voice nor by seeing his physical body but by opening our inner ears, our inner optics. For many of us that sense has lain dormant for then long that we demand to rouse information technology awake. (Engaging the arts is a great fashion to practice information technology!) When we open up the depths of our inner beingness to reality, we will meet God at the center of information technology.
"i thank You God for about this amazing" was set to music in 1999 by American composer Eric Whitacre as part of a larger a cappella choral piece of work titledIii Songs of Religion. Listen to the Stanford Chamber Chorale and the Choir of Trinity Higher, Cambridge, perform it below, under the management of Stephen Layton. Yous can purchase the sail music here.
The opening musical phrase is my favorite—the chord on "amazing" is, well, amazing! Then the voices leap, like the spirits of trees. They linger on the word "space," stretching it back and forth, as if exploring its bounds. The moments of polyphony (overlapping voices) pay homage to Cummings's syntax, with its scattered words. In the final stanza the voices climb upward on "open," mimicking spiritual rising, and echo the give-and-take four times, soaking in its wonder. Whitacre concludes the slice with a repeat of the first line, "i thanks God."
Although Cummings was no orthodox Christian, he at least viewed God as an imaginative, joyous creator and affirmer of life, someone big and beautiful and worthy of exaltation, every bit seen in "i thank You God for most this amazing." Even as the poem praises the transcendence of God—his size and his mystery—it besides praises his immanence in nature.
Despite some oddities, this poem is really 1 of Cummings's most intelligible, not about as eccentric as his others. Here's a 1953 recording of him reading it:
NOTES:
1.^ The title of the drove is a nonphonetic transliteration of the Greek word χαῖρε (chaire), significant "rejoice." As for the poem title: Cummings did not requite titles to his poems, so following scholarly convention, I refer to this one by its commencement line.
2.^ For the poet's name I use the usual majuscule letters in their usual places, per the directive of Cummings scholar Norman Friedman, who insists that Cummings never intended his proper noun exist rendered in all lowercase, as evidenced past his correspondence with a French publisher: http://kinesthesia.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps.htm; http://kinesthesia.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps2.html. Some typographical choices made by cover and title page designers while he was still living, perhaps coupled with his choice to lowercase the first-person pronoun "i" in his poesy, gave rising to the myth that he was "east. e. cummings." It didn't help that a preface past Harry T. Moore in the original 1964 edition of E. East. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer stated that Cummings had his name legally changed to all lowercase, a claim that Cummings's widow denied and had the publisher remove in reprint.
3.^ According to Cummings's manor, "Non only did Cummings spend a greater portion of his time painting than writing, he as well produced thousands of pages of carefully thought-out notes concerning his own aesthetics of painting: color-theory, analysis of the homo form, the 'intelligence' of painting, reflections on the Masters, etc." http://eecummingsart.com/prosp/?p=one
iv.^ R. P. Blackmur, "[Review of 50 poems]." Southern Review 7 (1941): 201–205. http://world wide web.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/reviews.htm
v.^ Run across https://www.unitarian.org.uk/pages/frequently-asked-questions-faq for helpful responses to questions such as "Are Unitarians Christians?" "What do Unitarians believe about Jesus?" and "Do Unitarians celebrate Easter?"
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