"kisses are a better fate"

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Here is another post in honor of National Poetry Month, and the poem is another from the tenth grade textbook. It might be a bit ambitious to teach e.e. cummings to sophomores, but I liked the poem so much that I couldn't help myself. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the poem, but it is so beautifully expressed that I feel compelled to love it.

since feeling is first
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