E. E. Cummings’s ‘‘Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town’’ rolls across the tongue like a preschool song. On one hand, the playful rhythm and sound complement nature’s sequences where life cycles rotate throughout the nine stanzas like a merry-go-round, life on a proverbial fast-paced playground. Masked, however, is life’s monotony and death’s certainty as the four-line stanzas, mostly tetrameters that mirror the four seasons, lead, perhaps, to an immutable certainty: everyone dies.
The poem opens with light, harmonious double dactyls in line 1: ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ Playful rhythm continues in subsequent dactyls such as ‘‘women and men (both little and small)’’ (5), ‘‘someones married their everyones’’ (17), and ‘‘many bells down’’ (2, 24) that stream into trochees like ‘‘pretty’’ (1), ‘‘summer autumn winter’’ (3), and iambs like ‘‘with up so floating’’ (2, 24). Bells, which often announce important events in small-town communities such as weddings or funerals, seemingly sway in varied meter that carries a carefree rising and falling as if the ‘‘many bells’’ celebrate life or joyfully acknowledge ‘‘anyone,’’ a youthful ‘‘he’’ who ‘‘sang’’ and ‘‘danced’’ (4) in the ‘‘spring’’ of life. But ‘‘spring,’’ the only monosyllabic foot in line 3, harbors the undertones of isolation and mortality that begin to emerge. By line 24, which repeats line 3, the bells seemingly toll for death, a solitary journey. Stanza 6 further suggests the human winter in ‘‘stars’’ (21) and especially ‘‘snow’’ (22), which often suggest a metaphorical season of death.
Monosyllabic feet such as ‘‘sun moon stars rain’’ (8), also break the easygoing pace to emphasize certain maturity for ‘‘anyone’’ toward the summer (‘‘sun’’) of life, which occurs without significance to others who ‘‘cared not [ . . . ] at all’’ (6) as if to focus on human isolation in the midst of humanity. Only the children in the third stanza notice that ‘‘anyone’’ and ‘‘noone’’ (12), the female persona, fall in love. As ‘‘someones married their everyones’’ (17), the poem increasingly hints of monotony and life’s insignificance. Interestingly, line 12 contains three feet rather than four. The trimeter reinforces ‘‘autumn’’ (11), often considered the metaphorical golden years of life as time like the line runs short. Line 23 contains two falling dactyls anchored around a rising anapest that gives a seesaw effect reflective, perhaps, of the children’s inevitable maturity and constant cycles of birth and death. The line’s extra foot creates contrast between ‘‘remember’’ and the fact that everyone ‘‘forget[s]’’ or is forgotten in time. The ‘‘snow’’ (22) suggests unavoidable death, which occurs in stanza seven as seasons continuously churn. As ‘‘anyone’’ and ‘‘noone’’ die, notably, the seasons turn perpetually to ‘‘april’’ (31) or spring, and back to ‘‘summer’’ (34) or ‘‘sun’’ (34) suggestive, perhaps, that in the midst of life death exist—yet, life goes on.
Also, the poem is highly alliterative and euphonic. Assonance dominates with variations on vowel sounds, especially o as in ow, which occurs three times in the first stanza alone: ‘‘how town’’ and ‘‘down.’’ The sound is repeated in ‘‘down’’ (10), ‘‘now’’ (13), and ‘‘how’’ (23). Long os flow throughout in words like ‘‘so,’’ ‘‘floating,’’ ‘‘both,’’ ‘‘sowed,’’ ‘‘noone,’’ ‘‘hope,’’ ‘‘snow,’’ and ‘‘sowing’’ (1, 5, 7, 12, 19, 22, 24, 22, 35). A sustained ooo courses along in words such as ‘‘moon,’’ ‘‘few,’’ ‘‘grew,’’ and ‘‘stooped’’ (8, 9, 10, 21, 26, 36). The resulting ow-oh-oo seems playful, yet mournful as they drench the poem in a sense of unhindered progression toward sorrow and death. They might be happy ohs or sad oh nos.
Rhymes, internal, end, and slant, hide the immutable force, time that orders human life. ‘‘By,’’ ‘‘by,’’ and ‘‘cried,’’ for instance, seem inconsequential until the reader slows on cacophonous gutturals like ir in ‘‘bird’’ and ‘‘stir’’ in stanza 4, while ‘‘grief’’ or sadness, underscored by ‘‘still,’’ imply that by and by grief awaits. ‘‘Deep’’ and ‘‘sleep’’ (29, 30), one of six end rhymes which normally render pleasure, also guide the reader’s attention to inescapable death. Some lines end in slant rhymes like ‘‘same’’ ‘‘rain’’ (7, 8), ‘‘guess’’ ‘‘face’’ (25, 26) and accentuate death’s poignant certainty by negation of rhythmic harmony.
Source:
Poetry for Students, Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry, Volume 30, e. e. cummings, Gale Cengage Learning, 2009
B. J. Hunt, ‘‘Cummings’s ‘Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town,’’’ in Explicator, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2006, p. 226.