Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a Charming Stop Motion Animation of an E.E. Cummings’ Love Poem

Valentine’s Day draws nigh, and we can only assume our read­ers are des­per­ate­ly won­der­ing how to declaim love poet­ry with­out look­ing like a total prat.

Set it to music?

Go for it, but let’s not for­get the fate of that soul­ful young fel­low on the stairs of Ani­mal House when his sweet airs fell upon the ears of John Belushi.

Sarah Huff, a young and relent­less­ly crafty blog­ger, hit upon a much bet­ter solu­tion when ani­mat­ing E.E. Cum­mings’ 1952 poem [i car­ry your heart with me(i car­ry it in] for an Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture class’ final project at Sin­clair Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege.

Her con­struc­tion paper cutouts are charm­ing, but what real­ly makes her ren­der­ing sing is the way she takes the pres­sure off by set­ting it to an entire­ly dif­fer­ent love song. (Echoes of Cum­mings’ goat-foot­ed bal­loon man in Ter­ra Schnei­der’s Bal­loon (a.k.a. The Begin­ning)?)

Released from the poten­tial per­ils of a too sonorous inter­pre­ta­tion, the poet’s lines gam­bol play­ful­ly through­out the pro­ceed­ings, spelled out in util­i­tar­i­an alpha­bet stick­ers.

It’s pret­ty pud­dle-won­der­ful.

Watch it with your Valen­tine, and leave the read aloud to the punc­tu­a­tion-averse Cum­mings, below.

[i car­ry your heart with me(i car­ry it in]

i car­ry your heart with me(i car­ry it in

my heart)i am nev­er with­out it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and what­ev­er is done

by only me is your doing,my dar­ling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beau­ti­ful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are what­ev­er a moon has always meant

and what­ev­er a sun will always sing is you

here is the deep­est secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

high­er than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the won­der that’s keep­ing the stars apart

i car­ry your heart(i car­ry it in my heart

Relat­ed Con­tent:

E.E. Cum­mings Recites ‘Any­one Lived in a Pret­ty How Town,’ 1953

Famous Writ­ers’ Report Cards: Ernest Hem­ing­way, William Faulkn­er, Nor­man Mail­er, E.E. Cum­mings & Anne Sex­ton

The Mys­ti­cal Poet­ry of Rumi Read By Til­da Swin­ton, Madon­na, Robert Bly & Cole­man Barks