Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...
Form and Meter
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room here: this poem is all over the place. Literally. Check out the lines on this guy! With all those free spaces between words and all those tabbed-in l...
Speaker
With simple language and repetitive phrasing, this guy’s not trying to make your brain hurt. In fact, he’s just laying out some images that he’ll return to, again and again, in an...
Setting
C’mon, you guys know that there are some days that are just…Days. It’s like the Last Day of School or the Night Before Christmas. Some days are special. Almost like national holid...
Sound Check
Sometimes this poem sounds like a little kid standing on the edge of a playground, jumping up and down because he’s sooooo excited that it’s finally time to play summer games. His langu...
What's Up With the Title?
"in Just-" serves double-duty: it's both adopted title and first line. Cummings makes up a hyphenated word (Just-spring) and then splits it up, putting half into the title and half into the first l...
Calling Card
Admit it: if you knew one thing about Cummings’s poetry before you read this poem, you probably knew that he was the guy who couldn’t be bothered to use capital letters. Heck, lots of f...
Tough-O-Meter
The lack of punctuation and capitalization has us scared at first. But when we get down to it, this is a simple little poem. It’s all bark and no bite. More importantly, it’s full of la...
Brain Snacks
Sex Rating
This is Disney-quality stuff here, folks. It’s about kids. Come on.…unless, of course, you think about this poem as a precursor to experience. Check out our "In a Nutshell" for some mor...
Shout Outs
Pan (19-20)