This piece, one of Cummings' best remembered, remains a somewhat defining highlight of much of the newness of his work. It is a highlight, however, largely on account of its referencing of "syntax", which could be understood as alluding to the "mystery" of the grammatical choices that Cummings was known to make. Indeed, what Cummings has to say here certainly works as something of an explanatory metaphor for his frequent strayings from grammatical norms. There is something to be learned here about Cummings, even if it does take the associations inherent to the word "syntax" to jump-start the analytical minds of those who still did not "get it", who still had questions as to why there is a space here and a hyphen there.
To say that to adhere to the "syntax of things" would make kissing impossible is to attack structuralism, voicing the poet's frustration with a world that insists on the early castration of all things spiritual by the cynical, point-by-point assessment of all that which is desired or enjoyed. Can a kiss be defined, can it be choreographed? Would not any attempt at all to systematize something like a kiss be effectively impossible? What about "wisdom"? Must not one keep one's guard at all times? Cummings iterates the suspicion that to immediately seek to understand is to preclude to feel. It is the nefarious and lasting itch that is the human capacity and appetite for reason that clouds human "instinct" and "purity", that is, human humanity.
The "paragraph" and the "parenthesis" at the end make clear and certain reference to the falsification that is the stubborn human propensity for systematization. Do not be choked by this fear and need, this needless addiction to the discipline of form, but rather escape into my arms. Our lives are not paragraphs, they are not pieces of some greater work, they are not humbly connected and at the mercy of a world which imbues them with this meaning or that, this value or that, no, they do not need the rules of grammar in order to exist. One need not confirm one's existence by contrived signs and structures when confirmation is her(/his) "eyelids' flutter". The languages that confirmed can now be abandoned that I have simpler confirmation. I am more free, no longer a slave to reason whereever I go and whatever I do, only a slave to the eyelids, which grant me a far greater freedom; or perhaps, more accurately, a far better enslavement.
That death is no parenthesis, this could imply that death is more neatly integrated into the whole. Or perhaps it is not a part at all. But it is certain that death is nothing lingering and ever-present, not something that cloaks itself insidiously in the shadows of parenthesis. Death cannot be something that exists necessarily in a book of rules and laws if this book of rules and laws necessarily does not exist.