Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring ties the poem together. Aside from the hand and its corresponding window (which, along with the later “flower” and “air,” are vehicular denizens of a simile), the only concrete and distinct noun in the entire nineteen-line poem is “spring” (Lines 17-18). It is possible to read “Spring is like a perhaps hand” as a symbolic take on some other subject. For instance, it would be interpretively defensible to read spring as a symbol of youth, and the “people look[ing]” (Line 4) as older people watching a new generation change and transform their world, though without destroying it (“without breaking anything”) (Line 19). It is also possible to understand spring as a symbol of change itself, making Cummings’s poem into a reflection on the nature of change.

However, it is also reasonable to understand youth and change as already an inherent part of the character of spring. Whether spring is an overarching symbol or a structural motif, its importance to Cummings’s poem is undeniable. In the poem, spring proceeds from the archetypal “Nowhere” and arranges the near-mythological “New and / Old things” (Lines 3, 13-14). Despite its almost cosmological origins and powers in Cummings’s poem, spring continues to apply its powers “carefully,” arranging rather than violently transforming.