Pavia Washington
September 28, 2010
English 102
“anyone lived in a pretty how town” The poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is a narrative about a town where the people only care about themselves. It’s about the passage of time and the normal things that happens as time goes on. E. E. Cummings portrays the people to be careless as implied in stanza 7. He contrast the people being selfish, line 2, stanza 2 “cared for anyone not at all” with the people being loving, line 2, stanza 4, “she laughed his joy she cried his grief”. There are many different ways to approach this poem. You can figure out the themes and meaning or talk about how Cummings ties nature to the main idea, like how he uses the seasons to make the point that the feelings of the people of the town never change and the passing of time. Lewis Turco found two themes of this poem. His first theme is “how can anyone live in a pretty town” where nothing much goes on, where people worry only about themselves although they are involved with everyone else. His next theme is that people do in fact live in towns like this one where as Turco says, “they are anyone and noone, of no particular significance except to one another on an individual basis; anyone does mean something to noone and mostpeople-both care and do not care; both love and do not love; are important to one another and are not important at all.” These themes contrast and may seem to cancel each other but they do not. They both are true. I tied the theme of nature to the passing of time and how the people never change. E.E. Cummings uses the seasons and the weather to emphasize how people of the “pretty town” feelings. He uses the seasons in stanza 1 to imply that people are caught up in their everyday lives. In stanza 2, line 4, “sun moon stars rain” is used to imply that the people have their own trials and problems so they do not worry about others. He uses the seasons in stanza 3 to show the passage of time and children growing up. “Star rain sun moon” in line 1 of stanza 6 implies that as the days go by the people are too busy to notice what is going on around them. Stanza 9 summarizes that overtime the town does not change. This interesting poem can be analyzed from many aspects. There is the obvious and the depth. You can find the symbolic meanings, the themes or break the poem down stanza by stanza. Lewis Turco chose the themes and I chose the somewhat symbolic meanings of the seasons and weather. E. E. Cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is about a town filled with normal people and their way of living.

Works Cited
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. Backpack Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Boston: Longman, 2010. Print.
Turco, Lewis. “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Masterplots II: Poetry, revised Edition (2002): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO.Web. 22 Sept. 2010.