i carry your heart with me

Still in copyright. Print it from a licensed edition — and check the reader is comfortable with the punctuation, which is deliberate and easy to stumble over.

Pieces still in copyright are listed by title and author only — we name them and tell you where to get them, but we do not reproduce the words. Public-domain text is printed in your script in full.

The lower-case “i” running through the poem is part of the typography Cummings made his own across much of his best-known work.

The poem says one thing and keeps saying it more deeply: the speaker carries the other person with him everywhere, so nothing he does is done alone. Whatever he achieves is partly theirs; he needs no other fate and no other world, because they already are both. In the last movement the poem widens out to a secret at the root of everything, a tree of life that grows past what anyone can understand, and claims that this love is what holds the stars in their places. It is intimate and cosmic at once, and very short.

Short and much loved. The punctuation trips readers — rehearse it. Read at a wedding ceremony. Themes: carrying someone with you · unusual punctuation · short · modern.

Romantic couples who want something modern that still sounds like a love poem, and long-distance couples for whom carrying each other is literal. It suits any ceremony, religious or not, and same-sex weddings without adjustment, since it names no gender. It is heard often, so a couple wanting something rare may look elsewhere.

Often the first reading, or the only one, read just before the vows by a friend or sibling. Its length makes it a good choice for a short courthouse or garden ceremony where a longer reading would drag.

Allow about 45 seconds at a ceremony pace of about 130 words a minute, from the reader’s first word to their last.

• The parentheses and run-together words are deliberate. Read the sense, not the punctuation: a parenthesis is a softer aside, not a pause long enough to lose the thread.
• Practice from the printed page the reader will hold, not from memory. Most stumbles come from the odd spacing, which looks different on every website.
• The poem returns at the end to where it began. Let that final echo be quieter than the first time, so it sounds like a closing rather than a repeat.

All wedding ceremony readings →