Informal Degrees of Comparison

Typical of IE is the use of absolute superla­tives, or elatives.

E.g.: And I like to marry her because she's got the longest, smoothest, straightest legs in the world.

In familiar and low colloquial speech the pleonastic comparative and superlative forms are used to give them greater emphasis, i.e. the forms in -er and -est are intensified by the addition of more and most.

E.g.: the most hextraordinariest thing (Cockney) - a more abler man - the most carelessest man - the bestest rnan - a worser condition

The transposition of other parts of speech into the adjective creates stylistically marked pieces of description as in the following sentence:

A camouflage of general suffuse and dirty-jeaned drabness covers everybody and we merge into the background. (Marshall)

The use of comparative or superlative forms with other parts of speech may also convey a humorous colouring:

He was the most married man I've ever met. (Arnold)

The following untitled poem was written by the American poet e e cummings:

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

This text - a love poem, of sorts certainly bears many of the familiar stylistic imprints of its author, notable among which is the conspicuous spelling and orthography resulting from the removal of standard punctuation devices such as commas, full stops and capital letters. It also contains a number of invented words, neologisms, such as the adjectives 'sunly' and 'moonly', as well as the verb 'unbe' which suggests a kind of reversal in sense from 'being' to 'not being'.

Perhaps even more markedly, the poem treats existing words in the English lexicon, espe­cially adjectives and adverbs, in a striking and colourful way. In counterpoint to this more 'deviant' strand of textual structure, there is nonetheless a high degree of regularity in the way other aspects of the poem are crafted. Observe, for example, the almost mathematical symmetry of the stanzaic organisation, where key words and phrasal patterns are repeated across the four verses. Indeed, all of the poem's constituent clauses are connected grammatically to the very first word of the poem, 'love'.

In order for a solid basis for interpretation to be built, we need to be both clear and precise about what resources of language cummings uses, so the preceding rather informal description needs to give way to a more rigorous account of linguistic tech­nique. To do this requires that we step back from the text for a moment in order to pinpoint more narrowly which aspects of language, in particular, the poet is manip­ulating. Adjectives, for a start, have already been highlighted as one of the main sites for stylistic experimentation in the poem.

To some extent, 'love is more thicker" is an object lesson in how not to form adjective phrases in English. Much of what the poet does is arguably either grammatically redundant or semantically anomalous. For a start, cummings constantly 'reduplicates' the gram­matical rules for comparative and superlative gradation. In spite of their one-syllable status, adjectives like 'thick' and 'thin' receive both the inflectional morpheme and the separate intensifier ('more thicker'). However, no sooner is this pattern intro­duced in the poem, than it is thrown off course by a number of secondary operations, which constitute good examples of internal foregrounding. For a start, superlative forms of other one-syllable adjectives like 'mad' and 'sane' do not receive the inflectional morpheme (as in 'maddest' or 'sanest') but are instead fronted, more unusually, by separate words: 'most mad' and 'most sane'. Thereafter, a further vari­ation on the pattern emerges where markers of both positive and inferior relations are mixed together in the same adjective phrase. Notice how, for example, 'big' is converted to 'less bigger' and, even more oddly, 'little' to 'less littler'. It is as if many of the grammatical structures in the poem are designed to push in two different direc­tions simultaneously, creating a textural frame which, the more it advances, the more it tends to self-nullify.

These are by no means all of the lexical and grammatical operations cummings employs, nor indeed are they even all of the tweaks performed on the structure of adjective phrases. The scope element, introduced above as the device that 'rounds off the meaning of the adjective phrase, also comes in for particular enhance­ment in the poem. Take first of all the conventional usage of the structure, as embodied in the proverb 'Blood is thicker than water'. Here the comparative adjec­tive 'thicker' connects up the entity 'blood' with the key item in the scope element, 'water'. Moreover, so that the adjective can, as it were, do its job, the entities thus compared need to be compatible.at least in some measure - both blood and water are liquids, for example, and it is their relative viscosity that forms the nub of the comparison. A comparison of 'love' might therefore reasonably anticipate another noun element which derives from the broad compass of human emotion, yet nothing of the sort is offered by cummings. Instead, it is verbs, of all things, which often fill the position reserved for the compared entity. Consider the opening sequence of the poem:

intensifier adjective scope. more thicker than forget

Here the adjective phrase works ostensibly to develop a comparison of the noun 'love'. That noun represents the abstract domain of human experience, yet the gram­matical relationship into which it is projected involves a comparative adjective standardly used to describe solids and liquids. Odder again is that the scope of refer­ence of that adjective is specified not by another noun from the same broad set as 'love' but by a verb referring to a mental process.

Other eye-catching patterns litter the poem, one of which emerges in the second and third lines of the first stanza and is sustained for the remainder of the poem. Eschewing adjectives completely in this case, cummings inserts adverbs of time-relationship like 'seldom', 'always' or 'never', into the main slot in the adjective phrase frame. Adverbs have a markedly different grammatical function from adjectives. Whereas adjectives describe qualities, adverbs normally describe circumstances. The adverbs employed here are of a specific type in that they provide circumstantial infor­mation about the duration and time-frame in which a verbal process did or did not take place. Furthermore, many of these adverbs function to communicate negative time relationships, and when piled up on one another, words like this can make a text very hard to unravel conceptually.

This framework is further problematised by other semantic devices in the poem. One such technique is tautology, which in common parlance means saying the same thing twice and which is embodied in everyday phrases like 'War is war' or 'If she goes, she goes'. Many of cummings's comparative and superlative structures are full-blown logical tautologies simply because they replicate the basic premises of the proposition. Notice how the some entities are positioned either side of the adjectival structure in 'the sea is... deeper than the sea' or 'the sky is... higher than the sky'. In the strictest sense, these comparisons aren't comparisons at all because their under­lying logical structures fail to establish new propositions. Other features embedded in the semantic fabric of the text include lexical antonyms, words of opposite meaning like the adjectives 'thicker' and 'thinner', the adverbs 'never' and 'always' and even the adjectival neologisms 'sunly' and 'moonly'. Antonyms are one way of establishing cohesion in a text, and perhaps rather ironically here, these opposites help shore up the poem's cohesive organisation when, so to speak, chaos is breaking out elsewhere in the grammatical system. Through its interplay between the levels of semantics, Lexis and grammar, then, 'love is more thicker' is a poem which is strongly cohesive on the one hand but which still seems to resist interpretation on the other.

It is admittedly not easy, when faced with complex language like this, to discuss either what a text means or indeed how a text means. However, it is important to stress that, in spite of the veritable semantic labyrinth that is 'love is more thicker', the poem still does communicate. Indeed, a case could be made for arguing that it is the very opacity, the very indeterminacy of its linguistic structure which acts out and parallels the conceptualisation of love that cummings seeks to capture and portray. The individual stylistic tactics used in the poem, replicated so vigorously and with such consistency, all drive towards the conclusion that love is, well, incomparable. Every search for a point of comparison encounters a tautology, a semantic anomaly or some kind of grammatical cul de sac. Love is a (once more of something and less of it; not quite as absolute or certain as 'always but still more than just 'frequent'. It is deep, deeper even than the sea, and then a little bit deeper again.

Perhaps more contentiously, a case might be made for suggesting that many localised stylistic features hint at the struggle of an innocent trying to find some resource in the language system that adequately captures this aspect of felt emotion. Notice for example how the grammatical reduplication echoes the expressions of a child trying to come to grips with the irregularities of English; 'worsest', 'more badder' and 'baddest' are, after all, common developmental errors and these have close styl­istic analogues in the poem. In many respects, this is a 'meta-poem', a poem about trying to write a poem. It seeks on (he one hand to capture the world of human understanding and relationships, although the difficulty of the linguistic exercise draws attention in turn to the difficulty in mediating that world through language. This lack of reconciliation between form and content is mirrored in the way the resources of the language system are deployed. Buried in the semantics of the poem is its central enigma, acted out in the very contradictions ascribed to the poem's central theme, the experience of love.

Much of the internal dynamic of cummings's poem is sustained by the subver­sion of simple and everyday patterns of language, and it is the distortion of these commonplace routines of speech and writing that deliver the main stylistic impact. In a sense, there is nothing to be scared of in a text like 'love is more thicker' simply because, as analysis reveals, the grammatical patterns of English upon which it is based are in themselves straightforward. That is why it is important to be precise in stylistic analysis, and indeed it is an important part of the stylistic endeavour that its methods probe the conventional structures of language as much as the deviant or the distorted. In any case, to say that the language of this particular poem is 'deviant' is both a sweeping and contingent categorisation. Foregrounding never stays still for long, and once a striking pattern starts to become established in a text, so, by imputation, it begins to drift towards the background as new patterns take its place. There is also, as noted, a high level of symmetry in the poem, which means that the technique of foregounding-through-deviation is supplemented by foregounding-through-more-of-the-same.

Finally, I hope this exercise has demonstrated the importance of making the analysis retrievable to other students in style, by showing how not just one level, but multiple levels of language organisation simultaneously participate, some in harmony and some in conflict, in creating the stylistic fabric of a poem.

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