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"le" is the masculine singular article, perhaps conveying the idea that loneliness is not gender-specific. The next two lines af and fa are like the leaf spinning around in its descent. (No, they aren't mirror images, but conventional typography has its limitations.) If you want to argue that fa like la represent single notes in the musical scale, I would not argue, (but don't accuse ME of superingenuity.) But doesn't the next line blow the whole singleness thing to smithereens? Back to back ells make eleven! A whole football team! Yes, but etymologically "eleven" means something like "one left over" in our decimal-oriented numbering or counting system. What is lonelier than being the one excluded from the group?

Then comes s). The closing parenthesis in my scheme is the falling leaf of line one which has turned around in flight. The last three lines speak for themselves: the spelled-out number; the numerical digit; then iness or the state of being first person singular.

Cummings is the only poet I know that looked at the shape of letters and punctuation marks so that capital O's can become balloons or bubbles and capital B's, overhead views of female breasts or buttocks. He must have looked at the word "loneliness" and seen the number one (try it in American Typewriter font) then the spelled out word followed by another number and then "iness" and thought to himself how the shape of the letters reinforced the word's connotative and denotative meaning.

Another Cummings gem that I feel I understand (and that should survive translation from Word into Helium format without trouble) shares with "l(a" the fact that it can't be read aloud. When I refer to it in speech, I call it "(IM)C-A-T(MO) because it is tough to pronounce dashes and parentheses. This is how it looks on the page.

(IM)C-A-T(MO)

(im)c-a-t(mo ) b,i;l:e

FallleA ps!fl OattumblI

sh?dr IftwhirlF (Ul)(lY) &&&

away wanders:exact ly;as if not hing had,ever happ ene

D

Let us now see what kind of a concrete poem we are presented with and try to figure out what the poem intended with his strange punctuation and capitalization.

In the poem discussed previously, the word "loneliness) surrounded the clause "a leaf falls." Now we have another falling body, but this one is animate.

The first pair of lines present the word "immobile" within which we find the word cat." The word is presented with hyphens - c-a-t - because the animal is stretched out asleep. The abstraction of immobility is rendered visual by having

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