Chansons Innocentes II

hist     whist
little ghostthings
tip-toe
twinkle-toe

little twitchy
witches and tingling
goblins
hob-a-nob     hob-a-nob

little hoppy happy
toad in tweeds
tweeds
little itchy mousies

with scuttling
eyes     rustle and run     and
hidehidehide
whisk

whisk     look out for the old woman
with the wart on her nose
what she’ll do to yer
nobody knows

for she knows the devil     ooch
the devil     ouch
the devil
ach     the great

green
dancing
devil
devil

devil
devil
     wheeEEE

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 29, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Chansons Innocentes II” appears in E. E. Cummings’s first collection, Tulips and Chimneys (Thomas Seltzer, 1923). The poem is the second in a suite of four poems titled “Chansons Innocentes,” or “innocent songs,” in English. In “When Syntax Leads a Rondo with a Paintbrush: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings’s ‘in Just-’ Revisited,” published in Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, no. 18 (October, 2011), R. A. Buck, professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, writes that the poem “celebrates country folk superstitions of All Hallow’s Eve or All Soul’s Day, when ‘witches and tingling / goblins,’ ‘little ghostthings,’ and other spirits of the dead make their appearance. The poem is written as a child feels in the midst of these ideas, stories, and legends of old age, death, and the supernatural; much of the diction is in child language. [. . .] [L]little creatures from another world are ‘scuttling,’ running, and hiding, creatures that are strange and fearful to a child, yet also described as childlike in character. [. . .] Cummings never lets us feel too sad about death. The suggestion is that we should do as children do: feel old age and death in our midst for only a brief moment, and then go back to playing. Cummings reaffirms the joy of life that is always in process, and even imagines the spirits of the dead continuing this fun, the way a child might imagine it, for, after all, it is a green, innocent devil that is depicted dancing.”