Decoding the Narrative Structure of E. E. Cummingsʼ Visual Love Poetry: A Stylistic Analysis of Foregrounding in "All in Green Went My Love Riding"

E. E. Cummings is known for his bold experimentation with poetic forms and eccentric deviation from linguistic norms in his visual love poetry. The peculiar distribution of lines and unerring rhetorical skills are given special zest and prominence by virtue of his twin obsessions: poetry and painting. The current study is premised on two tenets: first, foregrounding is the dominant feature of Cummings’ narrative poetry; second, the multitude of semiotic resources and their division of labor in his poetic texts, coupled with the wittily expressed attitudinal values, add new layers of discourse that are worthy of investigation. The aim of the research endeavor at hand is to unravel the poetic effects of the foregrounding devices employed in the love poem "all in green went my love riding". To this end, the meta-functions of Systemic Functional Theory and Visual Grammar are used as the basis of analysis. Various types of deviation and regular patterns, in terms of repetition and parallelism, are combined to enable smooth narrative flow while engaging the reader in the setting and the action from start to finish. Linguistic deviation effectively serves foregrounding in the poem. This, in turn, tempts readers to reach valid interpretations of the poem overall. The poem is an exquisite mixing bowl of counter-grammatical devices and regularities within the syntactic texture of each of the fourteen stanzas. The researcher argues that even with the less deviant of Cummings’ poems, textual and visual resources in the semiotic ensemble of the poetic text are carriers of potential meaning serving the overall structure of the narrative genre.