Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: - you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.

This line is from E. E. Cummings’s love poem commonly known by its opening words, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in)”. Written in Cummings’s characteristic modernist style—compressed syntax, unconventional punctuation, and intimate direct address—the poem belongs to the body of lyric work he produced in the mid-20th century, much of it centered on private devotion rather than public occasion. The poem is frequently read as a celebration of marital or lifelong partnership, and it has become one of Cummings’s most quoted texts in weddings and popular anthologies, reflecting its enduring cultural afterlife beyond the little magazines and small-press contexts in which much of his poetry first circulated.

The speaker claims the beloved as the generative “light” that gives birth to the self (“my spirit’s born”), then expands the metaphor into a total cosmology: sun, moon, and stars. The hyperbole is not merely decorative; it asserts that love reorganizes the speaker’s entire universe, making the beloved the measure of time (sun and moon) and the map of meaning (stars). In Cummings’s idiom, the line fuses spiritual language (“spirit”) with bodily immediacy and cosmic scale, suggesting that intimacy is both inward (identity, soul) and outward (world, sky). The effect is to portray love as an all-encompassing orientation rather than a single emotion.