The first five times I read this poem I was not able to figure out what it could possibly be talking about. Therefore, I went online and did a little research on “Buffalo Bill”’s life and reputation. I found out that Buffalo Bill came to be a figure that “embodied the spirit of the West”. Born in 1846, he spent his younger years as a prospector in the gold rush, as a rider for the Pony Express and as a scout in many Union campaigns against the Kiowa and the Comanche. However, he earned his nickname and his fame when he started working as a buffalo hunter for the constructions crews of the Kansas Pacific railroad. People started to call him Buffalo Bill because of the colossal quantities of buffalo he hunted. According to him, he killed at least 4,280 in just seventeen months.
e.e cummings’s poem is short and ambiguous. In my opinion, it can definitely have more than one plausible interpretation. I came up with to different analyses, and I think that the two are equally valid. In my opinion, cummings could be either using juxtaposition to highlight the irony of Buffalo Bill’s death or praising the cowboy’s everlasting fame.
I came up with my first interpretation because I saw a very pronounced difference between the first half and the second half of the poem. In the first half, cummings describes Buffalo Bill hunting on his “watersmooth silver stallion”. To provide even stronger imagery, cummings experiments with words and joins them together when he writes “onetwothreefour pigeonsjustlikethat” . The effect of this device is that the words sound like gunshots when they are read aloud. All of this first half of the poem pertains to Buffalo Bill’s killing of other creatures, but the second half deals with Buffalo Bill’s own death. When cummings asks the rhetorical question, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death”, he highlights the idea that nobody can escape death, not even legends. The juxtaposition of both ideas creates irony, for Buffalo Bill became a “hero” by killing other creatures but he obviously was not able to escape death himself.
As I re-read the poem again and again I thought of another interpretation, and I personally don’t think that it is any less correct than my first one. I think that the poem might actually be a celebration of Buffalo Bill, rather than a satire that highlights the irony of his death. The use of the word “defunct” in the second line is interesting. The word itself pertains to something that has stopped functioning. The way I see it, cummings might have used that specific word to emphasize that Buffalo Bill just lost physical abilities, he “stopped functioning”, but still abstractly lives on in legends and people’s memories. Also, it is important to consider cummings’s intention when he chose to mention Jesus in the poem. The name stands out because it is completely isolated. I think that cummings might have been trying to draw some type of parallel between Jesus and Buffalo Bill, a comparison that could serve to communicate Buffalo Bill’s immortality. Finally, the same rhetorical question that I mentioned before, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death” can be seen through a different lens. Instead of referring to Buffalo Bill’s inability to escape death, the question could actually be read with a slightly sarcastic tone and be interpreted as a subtle mock of “Mister Death”, who is unable to completely take Buffalo Bill because he definitely lives on in American culture.
e.e cummings’s poem is short and ambiguous. In my opinion, it can definitely have more than one plausible interpretation. I came up with to different analyses, and I think that the two are equally valid. In my opinion, cummings could be either using juxtaposition to highlight the irony of Buffalo Bill’s death or praising the cowboy’s everlasting fame.
I came up with my first interpretation because I saw a very pronounced difference between the first half and the second half of the poem. In the first half, cummings describes Buffalo Bill hunting on his “watersmooth silver stallion”. To provide even stronger imagery, cummings experiments with words and joins them together when he writes “onetwothreefour pigeonsjustlikethat” . The effect of this device is that the words sound like gunshots when they are read aloud. All of this first half of the poem pertains to Buffalo Bill’s killing of other creatures, but the second half deals with Buffalo Bill’s own death. When cummings asks the rhetorical question, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death”, he highlights the idea that nobody can escape death, not even legends. The juxtaposition of both ideas creates irony, for Buffalo Bill became a “hero” by killing other creatures but he obviously was not able to escape death himself.
As I re-read the poem again and again I thought of another interpretation, and I personally don’t think that it is any less correct than my first one. I think that the poem might actually be a celebration of Buffalo Bill, rather than a satire that highlights the irony of his death. The use of the word “defunct” in the second line is interesting. The word itself pertains to something that has stopped functioning. The way I see it, cummings might have used that specific word to emphasize that Buffalo Bill just lost physical abilities, he “stopped functioning”, but still abstractly lives on in legends and people’s memories. Also, it is important to consider cummings’s intention when he chose to mention Jesus in the poem. The name stands out because it is completely isolated. I think that cummings might have been trying to draw some type of parallel between Jesus and Buffalo Bill, a comparison that could serve to communicate Buffalo Bill’s immortality. Finally, the same rhetorical question that I mentioned before, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death” can be seen through a different lens. Instead of referring to Buffalo Bill’s inability to escape death, the question could actually be read with a slightly sarcastic tone and be interpreted as a subtle mock of “Mister Death”, who is unable to completely take Buffalo Bill because he definitely lives on in American culture.
