"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more"
About this Quote
Desire, in Cummings, isn’t a metaphorical fog machine; it’s physiology getting rewritten in real time. “I like my body when it is with your body” refuses the usual romantic alibi that love is chiefly spiritual. He starts with the plainspoken “I like,” almost casual, then lets the line tighten into something more radical: the self is not stable, it’s relational. Your body doesn’t just accompany mine; it edits it.
The odd, stumbling syntax (“It is so quite new a thing”) performs the experience it describes: language buckling under the pressure of sensation. Cummings is famous for typographical play, but here the innovation is emotional grammar. He doesn’t say “I feel new.” He makes newness an object, “a thing,” as if the speaker is surprised by his own rebooted embodiment.
“Muscles better and nerves more” is a sly escalation. “Better” suggests strength, posture, vitality: the body upgraded. Then “nerves more” complicates it. More what? More alive, more responsive, more exposed. The line leaves the sentence slightly unfinished, like a breath caught. That openness is the subtext: intimacy amplifies you and destabilizes you at the same time. You become stronger and more vulnerable in one motion.
Context matters: Cummings wrote against early 20th-century propriety and poetic decorum, insisting on a modern, candid eroticism that wasn’t draped in euphemism. The intent isn’t to shock for shock’s sake; it’s to claim the body as a legitimate site of knowledge. In his world, love doesn’t elevate you out of flesh. It makes the flesh newly legible.
The odd, stumbling syntax (“It is so quite new a thing”) performs the experience it describes: language buckling under the pressure of sensation. Cummings is famous for typographical play, but here the innovation is emotional grammar. He doesn’t say “I feel new.” He makes newness an object, “a thing,” as if the speaker is surprised by his own rebooted embodiment.
“Muscles better and nerves more” is a sly escalation. “Better” suggests strength, posture, vitality: the body upgraded. Then “nerves more” complicates it. More what? More alive, more responsive, more exposed. The line leaves the sentence slightly unfinished, like a breath caught. That openness is the subtext: intimacy amplifies you and destabilizes you at the same time. You become stronger and more vulnerable in one motion.
Context matters: Cummings wrote against early 20th-century propriety and poetic decorum, insisting on a modern, candid eroticism that wasn’t draped in euphemism. The intent isn’t to shock for shock’s sake; it’s to claim the body as a legitimate site of knowledge. In his world, love doesn’t elevate you out of flesh. It makes the flesh newly legible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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