The main similarity between E. E. Cumming’s poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town is the passage of time. An author reviewing the poem in “Poetry for Students” remarks, “Used to tell time long before the invention of clocks and calendars, the seasons, heavenly bodies, and weather are ancient signifiers of time as it passes.” Both the poem and the play use changes in the seasons and weather to express the passing of time. Each text focuses on how time passes without thought until death. Recurring lines in the poem mentioning the seasons, the weather and the sky mirror many sections of the play where the town’s folk seem to obsess about the weather and the sky.
The references to bells in both the poem …show more content…
In the last scene when Emily dies, she asks the other residents of the cemetery if it is possible for her to relive a day from her past. Against the advice of Mrs. Gibbs and other cemetery ghosts who tell her it is a bad idea, she decides to relive her 12th birthday. After re-experiencing the morning of her birthday, she breaks down crying. Her traumatic reaction to reliving that day made it clear to her that she would no longer be able experience life now that she was dead. She realized that time ended at her death. This is a similar theme in Cumming’s poem, as time ended for anyone and noone at their death.
In both of the towns, the citizens seem to keep to themselves and only worry about time passes in their own lives. This is shown in the play at the beginning of the funeral in act 3. Sam Craig, who moved away from Grover’s Corners to focus on his own life, stops by the cemetery before Emily’s funeral. As he talks to the grounds keeper, he looks around noticing how many names he recognizes on the tombstones and remembers that he had not seen these people in a long while. This shows that even after growing up in the town he didn’t really care to come back and visit because he had his own life to attend to. This same lackadaisical attitude is expressed in the poem when Cummings wrote, “one day anyone died I guess” (Cummings line 25). In both the play and the poem, as time continues the deaths of the main characters are forgotten by those still living. The passing of time makes people
The references to bells in both the poem …show more content…
In the last scene when Emily dies, she asks the other residents of the cemetery if it is possible for her to relive a day from her past. Against the advice of Mrs. Gibbs and other cemetery ghosts who tell her it is a bad idea, she decides to relive her 12th birthday. After re-experiencing the morning of her birthday, she breaks down crying. Her traumatic reaction to reliving that day made it clear to her that she would no longer be able experience life now that she was dead. She realized that time ended at her death. This is a similar theme in Cumming’s poem, as time ended for anyone and noone at their death.
In both of the towns, the citizens seem to keep to themselves and only worry about time passes in their own lives. This is shown in the play at the beginning of the funeral in act 3. Sam Craig, who moved away from Grover’s Corners to focus on his own life, stops by the cemetery before Emily’s funeral. As he talks to the grounds keeper, he looks around noticing how many names he recognizes on the tombstones and remembers that he had not seen these people in a long while. This shows that even after growing up in the town he didn’t really care to come back and visit because he had his own life to attend to. This same lackadaisical attitude is expressed in the poem when Cummings wrote, “one day anyone died I guess” (Cummings line 25). In both the play and the poem, as time continues the deaths of the main characters are forgotten by those still living. The passing of time makes people