Summary
“since feeling is first” is a poem about love and its relationships with intuition and reason, and life and death. In Stanza 1, the unnamed speaker declares that someone who prioritizes logic (“syntax”) over emotion (“feeling”) cannot engage in an authentic romantic relationship (“will never wholly kiss you”). Stanza 2 continues with the previous stanza's theme. It describes a state in which one enjoys life to its fullest, frees oneself from thought (“to be a fool”), and pursues youthful, joyful, and fertile love (“Spring is in the world”).
In Stanza 3, the speaker expresses their wholehearted approval (“my blood approves”) the lifestyle described in Stanza 2, then repeats this message by stating that a lifestyle characterized by intuitive, natural, and bodily expressions of love (“kisses”) is better than one invested in the abstract and cerebral (“wisdom”). The speaker swears “by all flowers” that their words are genuine. They (the speaker) then tell the “lady,” their lover, not to cry and to be happy, because even her subtlest expression of affection is more truthful than any idea or sentence that the speaker will ever devise or articulate.
Stanza 4 continues to celebrate the authentic love between the speaker and the lady. The speaker tells their beloved to be optimistic, and to rely on her lover (“laugh, leaning back in my arms”). The reason she should do so, according to the speaker, is that life is “not a paragraph”—life is complex, unlike a simple piece of writing that can be read and understood.
Stanza 5 is a one-liner that repeats the structure of the previous line. Death is “no parenthesis,” and is an integral part of life. The poem thus ends with a recognition of life’s finality and the desire to live and love in the moment.
Analysis
“since feeling is first” follows an unnamed speaker’s loose flow of ideas about love, bodies, reason, life, and death. The form of the poem mimics the speaker’s liberated, unrestricted manner of living and loving. Cummings composed this poem in unrhymed and unmetered free verse. No two stanzas are of the same length: The poem consists of a quatrain, couplet, sextet, tercet, and one-liner, but the length of each stanza seems to depend on the content and spoken rhythm rather than an overarching formal scheme. In addition, the poem does not feature a linear narrative arc or a central plot. Quite aptly, “since feeling is first” focuses on sensations, passing thoughts, and subtle gestures, rather than a clearly organized storyline.
While the piece as a whole is loosely structured, each stanza does add something different to the buildup of the poem. Stanza 1 lays out the foundations of the poem’s main idea: Feeling is superior to reason, and only feeling can allow one to love genuinely. Cummings uses “syntax,” a term used to refer to the structure of a sentence, as a metaphor for the logical order and the laws of the world in which we live. The phrase “wholly kiss” condenses the speaker’s definition of an ideal romance—one that is physical, intuitive, and passionate. The word “wholly” also evokes the word “holy,” implying the speaker’s sanctification of bodily and instinctual love.
Stanza 2 takes the poem to a different kind of landscape: It moves out of the image of two individuals kissing, and evokes the image of a “fool” enjoying the festivities of “Spring.” This stanza introduces the pastoral, festive, youthful, and fertile imagery of spring into the poem, and further elaborates upon the ideal romantic relationship, and by extension ideal way of living, described by the speaker. Stanza 2 stands isolated, without any punctuation marks. Both the transition out of Stanza 1, and the movement into Stanza 3, seem a bit jolting (certainly not syntax-friendly). The raw and independent quality of this stanza mirrors the attitude of the naïve, jolly, liberated “fool.”
Stanza 3, the longest stanza in the poem, is rich with images, metaphors, and gestures—it is almost as though these six lines are “springing” forth (like “blood”) from the fertility of the previous stanza. The speaker is ambitious, assertive, and imaginative in this part of the poem, equating “kisses” to a certain kind of “fate” (even putting kisses above the long-celebrated virtue of “wisdom”), and swearing “by all flowers” (although it is debatable if this is an oath before nature, or a promise whose validity expires as quickly as flowers). Stanza 3 also reveals important information about the addressee of this poem—she is a “lady,” and she seems, unlike the speaker, to be experiencing some degree of distress or uncertainty (“Don’t cry”) in this relationship. The speaker encourages the lady to have faith and optimism. Using the synecdoche of the “brain” and the “eyelids,” the speaker argues that the best logic of the former is ever inferior to the latter’s natural gesture of affection.
The transition between Stanzas 3 and 4 is an enjambment, and it is as though the speaker pauses briefly to figure out what the lady’s gesture means. The speaker’s thought process resembles the exercises semioticians go through: they examine symbols and investigate the meanings that they carry. It is ironic that the speaker is engaging in the activities of the semiotician (“[X] which says [Y]”) and the mathematician (“[X] is less than [Y]”), because these are all very cerebral and analytical activities. Perhaps the speaker is the one “who pays attention to the syntax of things,” and this is a poem about self-doubt and self-contradiction.
Irony aside, “since feeling is first” is also a complex piece in the way it brings life and death into the picture. In Stanza 4, after assuring the lady and cheering her up (again, using synecdoche: “leaning back in my arms”), the speaker throws in a complex, philosophical metaphor: “life’s not a paragraph.” In light of the earlier mention of “syntax,” this metaphor seems to express the futility of artificial linguistic constructs. The length, simplicity, comprehensibility, or artificiality of the paragraph may make it an inadequate metaphor for life.
Stanza 5, the final one-liner of the poem, states that death is “no parenthesis.” A parenthetical statement is nonessential and dismissible, and therefore, death, which is unlike a parenthesis, must be an integral part of human existence. Putting together these two statements about life and death, and connecting them to the speaker’s previous arguments about love, we can see that this is a poem about carpe diem, living life to the fullest, and loving without regret. What complicates this conclusion is the shadow of uncertainty cast by “i think” in the final line. Is the speaker hesitant? How many different personas of the speaker are we seeing in this poem? Is this a self-contradicting poem? Is feeling “first” at all?
