when man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because.

In this characteristically compressed, typographically playful line, Cummings contrasts “shall” (duty, prescription, external compulsion) with “why” (inquiry, meaning, purpose). The speaker suggests that self-destruction begins when a person abandons genuine questioning—seeking reasons and understanding—and instead forces life into the blunt logic of “because,” a word that can signal mere justification, rationalization, or obedience to causality without reflection. The violent verb “smashed” implies an act of intellectual and moral coercion: turning open-ended wonder into closed, compulsory explanation. The quote thus reads as a critique of mechanistic thinking and of surrendering agency to imposed necessity.