Classic Poem

Take any spark you see and study it;
It brightens, trembles, spurts and then goes out.
The light departs and leaves, we say, behind —
Who knows?
Succinctly, then, great men and little sparks
Are all the same in some vast dynamo
Of humming ether, ringed with unseen coils.
Now here am I, the smallest unit of
Electrical resistance. What to me,
You'd say, are systems of coordinates,
Or spectral lines, or vibgyor or all
The Morley-Michelson experiments?
Just this, the tiniest flash of energy,
Started beyond the furthest reach of space,
Makes ripples that will spread until the rings
Circling in that black pool of time, will touch
All other forms of energy and light.
Everything is related, all must share
Uncommon destinies.

The problem is
To find the hidden soul, it's with ourselves —
Within ourselves, if we know where to look;
A fourth dimension of reality.
But let us take an instance: Some one's shot.
Where? At Broadway and Forty-second Street.
The placed is fixed by two coordinates,
Crossing at sharp right angles in a plane,
But was it on the ground or in the air,
Below the surface or the thirtieth floor
Of that gray office-building? Knowing this,
Fixes the third dimension. But we must
Still find a fourth to make it definite;
Concretely, Time. If then we trace the source
And, having clearly mapped what's physical,
We turn to instinct, phototropic sense,
And glimpse a moment through the crumbling veil,
The soul, democracy, America;
A new Republic. . . .