In Poem 29 Cummings is telling a children's story, about children and grown-ups and about growing-up, in the deceptively simple-complex language of childhood. Cummings' highly conscious and perceptive naivete is the mode in which be tells a fable with at least two concurrent themes. One of these is lucidly explained by Mr. Steinhoff and Mr. Barrows (Exp., Oct., 1950, ix, 1). They read the poem as a "love-story" --and it is--of "anyone" and "noone," who saved their innocence and naturalnesss by avoiding the ways of the "busy folk." So it would be a lyric in praise of non-conformity.

But it is also an "unlove"-story. The fable, kindly and sweetly told to children, eases their discovery, or the reader's understanding, that "women and men" forget what children knew--how to love and be loved. And it is to this theme that stanzas 3 and 4 explicitly contribute. "anyone" and "noone" are also children (with perhaps a suggestion that "noone" is a boy's mother as he sees her). They are the ones who feel beloved and gradually forget to love. Their world contrasts with the topsy-turvy world of men and women. "anyone" and "noone" see that it is topsy-turvy and unhappy, but they grow up into it, of course ("anyone died i guess") and "forget to remember" how it seemed and was. Love in the grown-up world is sex ("both dong and ding") and the many bells no longer float. And so "anyone" becomes, as the poem unfolds, the lost and insular self of anyone, indeed--whom no one loved anymore.