The Voice at 3 AM

Read next to "She Walks in Beauty" the difference between cummings' view of love and a more traditional, if still r(R)omantic, view becomes obvious. Both poems  praise a single woman and imply a preferred means of connecting with them, an ideal form of love: Byron's is a possessive, paternal, lopsided love and cummings' is a connection at once overwhelming and intimate.

From his choice of the third person to the virtues he chooses (smiles that tell of days in goodness spent) Byron not only objectifies but also makes small and safe the woman he writes of. cummings' poem addresses the woman directly giving her not only life but a baseline of equality, which the third person denies Byron's subject. This woman whom cummings speaks to, she casually controls his existence:

"your slightest look easily will unclose me
...
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,"

 The source of her power, though, isn't new. The poem isn't femininist per se. The speaker finds attractive about this woman much the same as does the speaker in "She Walks in Beauty." The woman in cummings poem is still clasically feminine, but the speaker's own vulnerability enters the poem. Byron's objectification of the woman also removes the speaker from the lines. It allows the poem to be both honest and to protect a classical masculine image. The speaker in cummings piece, however, is completely exposed. In the stanzas represented by the lines quoted above, the speaker admits the way that he, personally, is under this woman's sway. But, he expands his reaction:

"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility"

His choice of "we" makes his declaration fascinating. The construction: the power of intense fragiity is genius, but cummings chooses this construction as the point at which to do something different with the poem. Everywhere else the poem is a matter of "you" or "i," but here there is a "we." To whom is the speaker referring? He's not referencing the two of them. Such a coupling would belittle the rest of the poem, which relies on the distance between the two of them for potency. It is a larger "we." The speaker opens up the comparison. He universalizes her femininity. He makes it comparable to any perceptible force, and then in the text stanza he brings it back into the realm of the secret. He returns to "you" and "i" : He makes their relationship intimate again.