Cummings begins this poem with very straightforward writing. Four little girls have gone to the beach to play. The fact that all these girls have the same name makes this poem seem like a nursery rhyme. The names are fun to say out loud, and the sounds skip over your tongue just as the little girls skipped over the beach.

This is a sweet poem and very well written. Every time you read it, you can easily imagine yourself at the beach. The beach is a great setting for this poem, because many of the best childhood memories are created there.
My favorite line of the poem is “it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.” It is very true. Whatever the children found at the beach that day is probably what they become later on. However, I also like the line “may came home with a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone.” Once when I was at the beach, I took a shiny pebble home. The stone helped me to remember my experiences at the beach.

This poem appears to be about beachcombing. At the beach, we can all find conches to sing in our ears, stranded starfishes, scuttling crabs, and interestingly shaped or colored pebbles. These everyday, prosaic items are transformed into something more complex because of the ideas that we have.

Cummings often disregarded rules of grammar. You can see in this poem how he doesn’t capitalize people’s names, and he doesn’t use periods. His unique writing style helps us to further understand this poem. Without any periods, you would read this poem from the beginning to the end without taking any pauses. This is like a child telling you a story. At the end of the long story, the child is breathless and you are mesmerized.

This poem is about finding our true selves, our true fears, and our true desires.