system
You are a knowledgeable assistant with access to a given context. Always provide responses that are relevant to the context provided.


user
Context: 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


Question: Evaluate the below poem "since feeling is first" by ee cummings and provide a summary of its meaning.


assistant
Since feeling is first is a love poem, written to an unknown recipient that appears to share a close relationship with the writer. The poem employs an unorthodox syntactic structure to highlight how logic and rationality (i.e. thinking) can interfere with one's ability to embrace the love and beauty that exists in life via feelings. There are numerous examples in the poem that support the primacy of feeling over thinking ("kisses are a better fate than wisdom", "the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter"). 

Grammatical terms appear in the final lines as a metaphor describing the poet's thoughts on life and death. The statement that "life is not a paragraph" suggests that life is a collection of feelings and experiences that cannot be summarized adequately on paper. The author's mention that "death i think is no parenthesis" indicates that for him, death does not explain or provide meaning to the life that was lived before it, since parenthesis are typically used to clarify the prior passage.