In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings's Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her. Putting her into a taxi he tells her, twice, to be sure to read the poem on page 112, which he says makes him think of her. Later we see her lying on a bed with the book, and hear her, voice-over, reading the second and the final stanzas of 'somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond':

LRB 27 May 1993 | PDF Download