VII [“since feeling is first”]

I don’t have much to say about this poem — or rather I do, but I’m trying to keep these analyses at least vaguely intelligent, and if I were to unleash myself here on this poem it’d be just a big puddle of love goo.

I read this poem early as an undergraduate biochemistry/molecular biology major, and it is one of the poems that year that changed my life. (I switched majors to English, irrevocably changing the trajectory of my life.) As someone who feels perhaps too much in a world that seems hell-bent on silencing emotion, it has become one of my anthems.

Why do I love it, besides the theme, delivered so happily, so merrily, so bouncily? (If Tigger were a poem, I think he’d be this one.)

What about the rhythm, the way the lines move so smoothly into each other? And the way the internal rhymes push the fourth and the fifth stanza together, the way all those small, monosyllabic words (“we are for each”) rush to the rhyming “other”? Yeah, I love it because of that.

And what about the way punctuation works? The way the word ‘leaning’ falls back on the comma, literally doing what the line says (“leaning back”) and what the addressee should be doing with the speaker? And what about all the meaning loaded into that colon, the way it functions almost like a logical operator (‘ergo’, ‘therefore’, ‘thusly’)? Yeah, I love that too!

And I’m not super big on the outdoors, but the whole bit about being a fool while Spring is in the world? I love that, too, because he’s not really seeing be a fool while Spring is in the world, he’s saying be a fool because Spring is in the world, even if it’s not necessarily Spring right now! Because if life is no paragraph and death no parenthesis, then nothing is separate, nothing is discrete, and it is always Spring, isn’t it, so why shouldn’t we be a fool all the time, wholly kissing you all the time, leaning back into that comma all the damn time?