since feeling is first Essay Questions

What is the tone of the speaker? How does it change throughout the poem?

Throughout most of the poem, the speaker maintains a confident and assertive voice. The speaker begins with a bold and unhesitant premise (“since feeling is first”), seems very certain about their own claim (“my blood approves”) and pledges their integrity to the addressee of the poem (“i swear by all flowers”).

This confidence, however, is complicated by the “i think” in the final line of the poem. It could, on one hand, be an understatement that underscores the inevitability of death, and backhandedly amplifies the assertiveness of the speaker. On the other hand, we can read this “i think” as a sign that a sense of insecurity or hesitation has suddenly entered the poem, reminding us that the speaker could be, in fact, wrong about all their observations. This sense of uncertainty brings us back to the irony of “since feeling is first”: that while the speaker denounces an obsession with “syntax,” the poem itself relies heavily upon syntax and other rhetorical and logical structures. It also allows us to see expressions like “my blood approves” and “i swear by all flowers.” Perhaps the speaker is a bit self-conscious?

Is “i think” a moment where the speaker realizes that they have been self-criticizing all along? Could the speaker (or Cummings) be the one who pays too much attention to syntax, and is incapable of loving with the heart and not the brain? Is “since feeling is first” a confession of the speaker’s own lack of passion?

What does the speaker mean when they say: “life’s not a paragraph / And death i think is no parenthesis”? What do these lines imply about the speaker’s attitude toward love and life?

The parallelism at the end of “since feeling is first” tries to define the meaning of life and death. These two lines take what at first presents itself as a love poem into the realm of deep philosophical discourse.

The lines “life’s not a paragraph / And death i think is no parenthesis” are about the brevity, complexity, and inevitability of the experience of life and death. The speaker uses the metaphor of the “paragraph” and the “parenthesis” to contrast the simplicity of syntactical constructs with the complexity of the human experience. Unlike a paragraph that can be read and understood, life is not something that can easily be comprehended. Unlike a paragraph, whose length is finite and measurable, our lives may be longer or shorter than we wish or predict them to be. Death is no parenthesis, either, in that it cannot be skipped or dismissed in the way a parenthesis can be.

The metaphor ultimately amplifies the speaker’s hedonistic claims about love, feeling, and reason. Because life and death are neither comprehensible nor predictable, the only thing that we can rely on in both love and life is the experience of intuitive pleasure.