English · Chapter 22
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
E. E. Cummings (1894 to 1962) was an American poet and painter whose work is known for its lower case spelling, its refusal of ordinary punctuation and its playful handling of syntax and typography. Cummings treated a poem as something to be seen as well as read, so line breaks, brackets and small letters do part of the work that grammar usually does. "who are you,little i" is one of his shortest and gentlest lyrics. In it a grown speaker turns round and speaks to his own childhood self, a boy of five or six at a high window watching a November sunset, and the poem closes by calling the passing of day into night beautiful rather than a loss.
The poem opens with a question that is also a kind of greeting. The speaker asks who the "little i" is, and that small i is the speaker himself as a child, fixed in memory at the age of five or six. The question is not a request for information, because the speaker already knows the answer. It is the surprise of an adult who looks back at a much earlier self and finds someone both familiar and out of reach.
The picture that the memory holds is very simple. The child is at a high window, peering out at the end of a November day, and what he sees is gold, the colour of a late sunset laid over the closing day. Nothing happens in the scene. There is no event, no other person and no speech, only a small child absorbed in the light, giving an ordinary evening the whole of the attention that adults usually lose.
The poem then moves from what the child saw to what the child felt, and this is the turn on which everything rests. Watching the daylight fade, the child feels no fear and no grief. He feels instead that if day has to become night, then this is a beautiful way for it to happen. The condition matters as much as the feeling: the child takes the ending as a necessity, and inside that acceptance he finds the going itself lovely.
The closing lines therefore carry much more than a sunset. Day turning into night is the oldest of all figures for a life moving towards its close, and the adult who remembers the window is far nearer that close than the boy ever was. By quoting the child's feeling instead of correcting it, the speaker allows the child's calm to stand as wisdom, so the poem ends in consent rather than complaint.