twice I have lived forever in a smile

The line compresses a characteristic Cummings paradox: “forever” is not a duration but an intensity of experience. “Twice” suggests two discrete moments—likely encounters of love, beauty, or recognition—so complete that they feel timeless. By locating eternity “in a smile,” the poem elevates a fleeting human gesture into a vessel of the infinite, implying that meaning is not found in grand abstractions but in immediate, embodied perception. The phrasing also hints at memory’s power: the speaker can “live” those moments again, so that the past, briefly re-entered, becomes a kind of eternity.