old age sticks up Keep Off signs)&
youth yanks them down(old age cries No
Tres)&(pas) youth laughs (sing old age
scolds Forbid den Stop Must n't Don't
&)youth goes right on gr owing old ^*

e. e. cummings

The concluding statement in this poem makes the warnings of old age a metaphor for a warning of an entirely different sort. In the first two stanzas, the prohibitions of old age are met by youthful rebellion. The activity of old age appears within the confines of parentheses, suggesting repression; the activity of youth is unbounded by parentheses, suggesting refusal to accept restrictions. ¹

In the central stanza, youth verbally breaks through prohibition by old age, so that two people (ideally one young, one old) reading simultaneously are necessary to perform this stanza aloud. The eruption of youth through age in this stanza may suggest the transition from youth to age, since the subsequent stanza is a cumulative expression of old age that is not, as in stanza two, countered by rebellious youth but is followed by an assertion that youth grows old. The transition from youth to age is suggested at the very center of the poem by apparent continuity in the juxtaposition of conventionally related syllables—"laughs / (sing"—as though youth makes both these happy soundsbefore the reader recognizes "sing" as the conclusion of the injunction by old age, "No Trespassing."

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