Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

both
the inflectional morpheme 
and
the separate intensifier (‘
more
thick
er
’). However, no sooner is this pattern intro-
duced in the poem, than it is thrown off course by a number of secondary operations
which constitute good examples of 
internal foregrounding
(see B1). 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 vari-
ation 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 direc-
tions 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 enhance-
ment 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 adjec-
tive ‘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
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the position reserved for the compared entity. Consider the opening sequence of the
poem in the context of the structural formula set up in B2:
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 gram-
matical relationship into which it is projected involves a comparative adjective
standardly used to describe solids and liquids. Odder again is that the scope of refer-
ence 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 infor-
mation 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. For example, if someone were to remark of the book
you are currently reading that ‘This is a book you must not fail to miss’, you might ini-
tially interpret this as a solid endorsement of the work in question. However, closer
scrutiny will reveal that the remark means precisely the opposite; that is, that you
should endeavour at all costs to avoid this book. In terms of discourse processing, then,
the cumulative build up of words like ‘fail’, ‘seldom’, ‘forget’ and ‘less’ – words denot-
ing a kind of negative semantic space – creates a complex interpretative framework
which makes the text in certain respects almost impenetrable as a unit of meaning.
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 
same
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 under-
lying 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,
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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.
Stylistic analysis and interpretation
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 at 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 styl-
istic analogues in the poem. In many respects, this is a ‘meta-poem’, a poem about
trying to write a poem. It seeks on the 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 subver-
sion 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, as noted in A1, 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