SOURCE: "Ammons's 'Singing & Doubling Together,'" in The Explicator, Vol. 49, No. 3, Spring, 1991, pp. 187-90.

In the following essay, McGeachy Mills asserts that "In its every complexity" Ammons's 'Singing & Doubling Together,' "signals the mysterious, paradoxical, somehow linearly unknowable experience of doubling with the divine."

A. R. Ammons's poem "Singing & Doubling Together" demonstrates the power of carefully chosen signs to create and to recreate, while exposing through the medium of the poem a complex, nonrational experience of union.

Speaking in the first person, in the present tense, from within the event itself, the speaker describes a real experience—not hearsay, but sound personally heard. That sound joins the I to a you who is an equal subject in the poem and in the experience, but a superior power. Nowhere in the poem does the identity of either the speaker or the one addressed become more specific than the personal...