“my father moved through dooms of love” is an elegy written in 1940 in praise of the speaker’s father. The poem is a place for mourning and instruction, so it only features two characters: the speaker, writing through the ache of loss and longing, and his father, who appears only as a figment of the speaker’s painful memories. Though it is often a mistake to conflate the speaker of a poem with its author, it is widely assumed that the speaker of “my father moved through dooms of love” fills in for Cummings himself. Indeed, most scholars agree that Cummings wrote the poem about his father, Edward Cummings, who died suddenly in 1926 when his car was hit by a train.

The Speaker

The poem is a eulogy, so the speaker reveals little about himself. He takes shape at the edges of the poem and acts as the subjective lens through which his father is posthumously formed. In this sense, readers quickly learn of the deep love and incredible admiration he felt for the man who raised him. Indeed, the poem bleeds with longing, and much of the emotional weight stems from the speaker’s unspoken sorrow. Cummings orients this overview of the father’s virtues around the man's understanding of the world and relationship with its occupants. His relationship with his son does not figure into the narrative. It is a poignant choice, for the relationship between father and son—though felt deeply enough to conjure the open adoration the poem espouses—slides beneath the surface and goes largely unaddressed.

Readers see, too, that the speaker does not admire his father for conventional reasons; the elegy addresses neither occupation, hobbies, nor interests. No, the speaker admired his father for how he conducted himself and treated others. He presents his father’s choices as the ideal way of living life, and readers realize that, by writing the poem, Cummings seeks to spread his father’s inspiring legacy of love and compassion to the world. 

The Speaker's Father

The speaker’s father is the didactic subject of Cummings’s 1940 “my father moved through dooms of love.” The poem eulogizes the deceased man in an incredibly moving and artistic way, describing him as someone for whom "joy was his song and joy so pure / a heart of star by him could steer." He was a man who eagerly embraced life’s little pleasures and understood the interconnection of the world. Life, in his view, was to be lived in service, and the poem spares no space discussing the avenues of compassion and care he so often frequented. 

While the elegy is a space for the speaker to make peace with his father’s death and recall the values of the man he so dearly loved, it is also a place for the speaker to extend such traits outward. The poem suggests that his way of living—choosing kindness and understanding over all else—is something readers should strive for. If there were more men and women like his father, the speaker argues, the world would be a happier, more unified place. Perhaps “hate were why men breathe," but anyone can choose otherwise and, like his father, live life for the benefit of others.