“NOBODY, NOT EVEN THE RAIN, HAS SUCH SMALL HANDS”.

“NOBODY, NOT EVEN THE RAIN, HAS SUCH SMALL HANDS”. In yesterday’s post, I said that I usually don’t place a poem in the history of Western literature in the way that the Economist did with “Westron Wynde”.

A few minutes after I showed Mary Jane that post, Mary Jane said that she was thinking of both the “small rain” and of the last line of one of her favorite poems by e e cummings: “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”.

Here is the complete poem:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands