Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons-
justlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

E. E. Cummings wrote this poem in the early 1920s, when American popular culture was rapidly mythologizing frontier figures and mass entertainment. “Buffalo Bill” refers to William F. Cody (1846–1917), whose Wild West shows turned sharpshooting and staged “Indian fights” into international spectacle. Cummings, a modernist poet attentive to typography and the language of advertising and celebrity, frames Cody as a once-glamorous public icon now “defunct.” The poem’s compressed, poster-like layout echoes the sensational rhythms of show business while undercutting them with mortality, ending in a direct address to “Mister Death.”

The poem juxtaposes celebrity bravura with the blunt fact of death. Cummings mimics the breathless patter of a performance—“onetwothreefourfive”—to evoke Cody’s showy skill, then punctures the myth with the stark label “defunct.” The sudden exclamation “Jesus” reads as both awe and shock, registering how charisma can inspire near-religious admiration. Yet the closing question—“how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death”—turns the gaze from the audience’s adoration to death’s indifference. The “blueeyed boy” suggests the favored, all-American hero; the poem implies that even the most celebrated figure is finally reduced to a corpse, and that fame is a fragile defense against oblivion.