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# since feeling is first
- URL: https://poetry101.love/since-feeling-is-first/
- Published: 2020-11-21T15:22:00.000Z
- Updated: 2022-01-23T23:12:45.000Z
- Description: by E.E. Cummings
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: E.E. Cummmings, Morning Memory, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

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

Cummings, Edward Estlin, and Firmage, George James. [Is 5](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Is%5F5/ZVu%5FygEACAAJ?hl=en&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United Kingdom, Liveright, 1985.

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### Why I Chose this Poem

I learned the poem for a class when I was working toward a teaching certificate. I bought a dress with poofy sleeves and cabbage roses in which to recite it. My proposed teaching unit was "Artists Responding to Art with Art" and I wrote a poem in response to this, wherein I learned about the edge I have, where I think I love something, but there's also anger.

I wrote it the night before the unit was due. I don't believe I have the poem any longer. I don't remember most of it, but I do remember the part where I discovered my anger.

> The best gusture of your brain  
> is indeed less than my eyelid's  
> flutter, which says  
> it's a feeble gesture.