The Voice at 3 AM

The poem is built on a narrative. A man speaks to a woman. His words are part apology and part seduction. The poem states a preference for literal, physical acts of love over anything abstract, and that alone is an interesting enough viewpoint, but the language cummings uses allows his point to extend far beyond simply saying it's better to love than to think.

and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom

 cummings choice of "wisdom" is dangerously potent. With it he invokes Plato and by extension the entire Western tradition, and he subordinates all of it to kisses. His point is not the childish: I'd rather make out with a girl than read a book. Rather, he judges the fate of a man who pursues wisdom and that of a man who pursues kisses, and the man who pursues, even finds, wisdom is found wanting.

The reason that the man who seeks wisdom lives the lesser life is because "life's not a paragraph." The straightforward reading is adequately meaningful. Life has no thesis, no grammar, no beginning, no end. It isn't bound by tense or even page. Read 90 years later, the poem feels oddly prescient. Philosophically, it stands against the trend that would become popular some years later to bind man's existence within his language. On a more direct level, daily life today is lived within a representative culture sustained by information technology. Entire relationships today exist within paragraphs (albeit paragraphs of ever evolving languages and types). It is as much the romantic as the physical and the physical as the immediate than cummings champions with this poem.