[Since feeling is first]
By E. E. Cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 16, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this poem: “[since feeling is first]” appeared in Is 5 (Boni and Liveright, 1926).
About this poet: Born Edward Estlin Cummings in 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cummings was a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright from the Modernist movement. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”