Touring Programs
Silver Lake Summers
an e. e. cummings revue
Based on the life and work of American poet and painter, E. E. Cummings, Silver Lake Summers focuses on Cummings’ connection to New Hampshire. When Cummings was a boy, his family bought a farm in the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains near Silver Lake from a farmer named Ephraim Joy. Cummings was indebted to his boyhood summers at Joy Farm for his Wordsworthian love of nature. In his adult life Cummings continued to live at Joy Farm from May to October every year. He took up bird watching and thumbed Peterson’s guidebooks. He painted Mount Chocorua as often as Cezanne did Mont Sainte-Victoire. Watching the sun set behind the mountain became an evening ritual that he required everyone in the house to join. His many poems that celebrate the natural world and the denizens of the forst were inspired by his Silver Lake summers.