ring slaughter” hint at the presence of war and soldiers going off to fight in it. However, “by jingo by gee by gosh by gum” gives the impression that this speaker has not put any thought into the words he speaks.The last line of the poem shows the speaker drinking a glass of water rapidly. Why did cummings choose to invert this line? Why does the speaker drink at all? cummings could be mentioning this detail in an effort to portray just how irrelevant this speech really is. The adverb “rapidly” occurs in a most unlikely position in this thought. If we eliminate the need for rhyming “water” with “slaughter,” since the necessary rhyme for this poem might well have been achieved without inverting the syntax, then cummings must have had some other reason for the inversion of the syntax. Could it be that by writing a poem, which expresses a theme of “inverted” or confused philosophy, cummings inverts his apparently objective commentary on the situation and the words in which he reports his commentary to produce an ironic tone? This line, then, further serves to point to the “inverted” philosophy of this speaker and foregrounds the insincerity and thoughtlessness behind this speech.In this poem, carefully worked out in sonnet form, cummings pillories a Fourth-of-July speechmaker by choosing patriotic and religious clichs common to platform oratory and compressing fragments of them together in order to demonstrate the meaningless emptiness that the speakers appeals have. The first line of the poem, “next to of course god america i,” produces a sense of confusion though the use of syntactical deviation. Immediately we see that the speaker of this poem is only stringing thoughts together and is not really thinking about what he is saying. This also leads to a feeling of rambling a jumble of thoughts with a severe lack of sincerity. The presence...
