Reading "my father moved through dooms of love" demands a brief survey of the poet himself, for his context is exceedingly relevant to the poem's themes and meaning. The 1940 poem is an elegy written on behalf of E. E. Cummings's father, Edward, a Unitarian minister killed in a car crash fourteen years prior. An elegy is a poem that celebrates the life of someone who has died and is a serious and sincere genre.

Against this backdrop, the elegy takes on a double-edged intent, at once praising the speaker’s father for his virtuous and compassionate way of life while instructing readers on how they too might live such lives. Cummings provides a moral compass informed by compassion, depicting the father’s ceaseless acts of small, poignantly individual acts of kindness. For instance, he comforted a weeping person and helped her to sleep. Even the cry of the "smallest voice" evoked a caring response from him. His father used to "sing" joyfully and spent his life pursuing his passion and dreams. Notably, these dreams are neither greedy nor self-directed; indeed, his father’s greatest desire was to help the hungry and aid the crippled—dreams, it is implied, that he fulfilled.

He lived sincerely, experienced righteous anger, comforted those suffering, and laughed through adversity. He believed in sociality and community; his life centered around people and community. The poet’s father rejected the "Pomp of must and shall" to instead do what he believed was right. According to the poem, he is a model for the rest of us to follow.

The last stanza, particularly the last line, emphasizes this theme. The poem ends with the sentiment: "love is the whole and more than all." Love was the driving force in his father’s life: love for the world and for every single person he encountered. It was the defining feature of his worldview; indeed, it was “more than all.” As the speaker explains, it was the lens with which he encountered “the whole” or the entirety of his life. 

For his father, this way of life was not exceptional; it was simply how he chose to live and act. From Cummings’s outside perspective, his father’s propensity for love and compassion was unique and hard to find. In the last stanza, he carefully notes how contrarian his father was: "I say [love] though hate were why men breathe." This line ties hatred and antagonism to the basest human necessity as if hatred is necessary for survival. However, his father’s ceaseless compassion and freely given love indicate the power and triumph of love over this bleak reality; love must be stronger than hate, for there are people in the world who choose to reject the base hatred so natural as “breath[ing].” Perhaps it is a trite sentiment, but for Cummings, grieving his virtuous father, it must have felt incredibly apt. 

Cummings's poem celebrates what his father did in this life—with no mention of an afterlife or a heavenly reward, even though his father was a minister. This sends the message that what we do on earth is the most important thing in and of itself. Our life is the sum of all our seemingly small gestures, and these acts are not valuable because they get us to a paradise beyond the grave but because they make the world a better place.

The poem orbits the mundane. It finds beauty in small kindnesses, in simple words, in the life of a man lived in service. As such, it meditates on all the minute pleasures and idle happiness that make life on the mortal plane worthwhile. His father would “sing each new leaf out of each tree,” a natural connection that indicates the deep love that can be found amongst the “theys of we.” In short, the poem argues that life is a gift. It is an underappreciated phenomenon, for there are few people who understand its idle beauties and interconnection. However, there are those who, like the speaker’s father, “sing” out in worship of life and value every aspect of the wondrous world before them.