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

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

Perspective of Co-ordination

Arthur Davison Ficke

THE CIRCLES never fully round, but change

In spiral gropings—not, as on a wall,

Flat-patterned, but back into space they fall,

In depth on depth of indeterminate range.

Where they begin may be here at my hand

Or there far lost beyond the search of eye;

And though I sit, desperately rapt, and try

To trace round-round the line, and understand

The sequence, the relation, the black-art

Of their continuance, hoping to find good

At least some logic of part-joined-to-part,

I judge the task one of too mad a mood:

And prophecy throws its shadow on my heart,

And Time’s last sunset flames along my blood.