Spring is like a perhaps hand

“i’ll tell you a dream i had once i was away up in the sky Blue,everything:” by E.E. Cummings (1925)

The “III” that begins “Spring is like a perhaps hand” refers to the poem’s appearance in a sequence in E.E. Cummings’s self-published &. The sequence, entitled “&: SEVEN POEMS” contains, as one might imagine, seven different poems. “I’ll Tell You a Dream […]” is number II, appearing directly before “Spring is like a perhaps hand.” Aside from its textual relevance, this poem also experiments with typography and syntax in a slightly different way than “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” providing a good range of Cummings’s early poetic innovations.

"The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot (1922)

The beginning of “The Waste Land’s” first section, “I. The Burial of the Dead,” is relevant to Cummings’s poem. Its first stanzas describe spring in a vastly different way than “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” though it was published only a few years prior.

“a thrown a” by E.E. Cummings (1950)

This little poem from Cummings’s late career was published in his collection XAIPE (1950). The poem is a pristine example of Cummings’s fully developed techniques of multiple itineraries, lineation, syntax and punctuation manipulation, and more.