All in green went my love riding Man and the Natural World Quotes

Check out how the syntax of this line almost makes the mountain seem like it's moving. Sure, if we were to re-phrase this line, it might look something like "my love is riding down the mountain." But, by inverting the order of the object and the verb, Cummings makes the act of riding occur directly beside the mountain. Putting the words closer together makes the action seem more immediate. And that makes the mountain take up more space (in our minds, at least) than the rider riding.

Right from the start, Cummings plays with the sorts of adjectives that we tend to associate with humans and those we tend to use to describe nature. What color would you use to describe the natural world? Green would probably be high on the list, right? And what about people's riches? In olden times, before the almighty dollar, people carried around gold. But here the green is describing a human, while the gold is used to describe a horse. Hmm… something's not quite what it should be—and we're only at line 2.

Although the natural world sometimes gets described using human qualities, here the deer are described with extraordinary attention. Notice how the first adjective describes their physical characteristics (sweet and red) while the second is more evaluative? We're already getting a sense, even in a description, of some human perception at work.