Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses cummings's poem as an exploration of transcendental love and spiritual knowledge.

Cummings's love poems are celebrations of a many-leveled intimacy between a man and a woman. Many of them also reveal a mystical longing for transcendence that grows out of the experience of love. Transcendence is the experience of a dimension of life that is beyond all everyday categories, something that feels utterly complete, is timeless and silent, and conveys the feeling of being at the very root and essence of existence, beyond all distinctions of subject and object, of "I" and "you."

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" is one such poem. At its most immediate level, it is a poem that honors an inexplicable mystery: how, through the experience of love, one human...