What’s Up With the Title?

Like many of his poems, E.E. Cummings decided to keep all the letters in his title in lower case. The overall effect of this tactic is to make the title seem as though it was pulled out of some longer statement. And in a sense, this idea echoes Cummings' overall point: human life is something that's been separated out from the general background of nature and its endless cycles (which we see with Cummings' repetition of the weather and the seasons).

The fact that Cummings' makes this poem about a figure named "anyone" also takes away the idea that an individual human life is something unique. Instead, Cummings reminds us that, every day, thousands of "anyones" are born and die, and the cycle of life and death goes on the same way it always has. It doesn't matter how pretty a town you live in or how many kids you have, you're not going to overcome the cycle of life and death. No one does, and Cummings' clever and understated title helps us realize that our own lives are just micro-snippets of Earth's much longer story.