e. e. cummings

I think that people read Cummings for a good reasons: he experiments with punctuation and line breaks in original ways, for example. I think he's not read nearly enough for the way he plays with meter and rhythm. This poem also has a tone that sounds almost playfully wistful; it's as though he's consciously evoking feelings of sentimentality and nostalgia.

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer's lie,

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man.

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of it's grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't:blow death to was)

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die,the more we live

I particularly love the description of just what this wind (or, in the final stanza, this "dawn of a doom of a dream") would be doing: the "blow x to y" expressions. The latter's set up early on to be a diminished form of the first: a king becomes a beggar; a queen becomes hollow, merely appearances, just a "seem." It's quite easy to see how "death" is a more momentous thing than "was." The diminishings in between, I think, are where the real crux of the poem lies. In what respects is time "lesser" than space? Or, since that seems wonky, why does the persona feel that way?

Also, it seems (to me, at least) that the first two stanzas are explicitly about the seasons (particularly the final two lines of each stanza). Why isn't the third? Where does it depart, besides the invocation of something besides a "wind?"