ation except for the quotation marks, an apostrophes and a question mark. This is so the lines run into each other, creating a sense of confusion. The lines in the poem are a collection of clichs that have been used throughout the years describing patriotism for this country or phrases that have been used in everyday life. Cummings discusses his feelings toward a nation's attitude of war, through the quotation of clichs. He could not understand why this nation would send our troops off to "the roaring slaughter." His writings suggests the question of whether this country has nothing better for its young men than to send them off to die in war. There is also a run on word present in the quotation, "deafanddumb." This is done to show how closely related these two words are and that society, at the time, viewed them both as one and the same. It was also what the hierarchy of this nation felt regarding the average intelligence of the common man. There is a line break that separates the last line from the body of the poem. The unusual aspect of this is that cummings capitalized the "H" in "He" and used a period. The capitalized letter is startling because cummings, who is so modest that he had his name legally changed to all lower case letters, never thought any human was important enough to have capitalized letters in the pronoun form. The period was also amazing because cummings never uses them in their prescribed manner, yet he does so in this poem. In "whippoorwill this" the style again includes run on words and this time cummings also uses inventive, original words as well as line breaks. In this poem there are two run on words, the first is "whippoorwill," followed by "moonday." When one thinks of the word whippoorwill, one thinks of the bird, but that is not so in this case. Don Jobe said "'whippoorwill' may be split into three separate words: whip, poor and will. . . . [The reader] may attribute 'will' to a man's will, thus 'whip' an...
