dots-menu
×

Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Arthur Davison Ficke

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

World beyond World

Arthur Davison Ficke

TWO mirrors, face to face, is all I need

To build a mazy universe for my mind

Where world grows out of world. I dizzily find

Solace in endless planes that there recede.

The fifth plane-world, soft-shimmering through the glass—

Surely it has a light more bland than ours.

And in the far ninth hides a whirl of powers

Unknown to our dull senses. I would pass

Down the long vista, pausing now and then

To taste the flavor of each separate sphere,

And with each vast perspective cool my eye.

Whom should I meet there? Never living men!

What should I love there? Nothing I hold dear!

What would the end be? Endless as am I!