INDIRECT APPROACH

You use words to express maximum theocratic meaning,

You don't pay too much attention

To grammar or technique. You aren't

An atomist, torn between relativities, but

A bound-electron equivalent

Who favours a conceptual absolutism,

A mind given to essences to a much

Greater extent than to appearances.

Why, you don't even divide

Your poetic thoughts into stanzas, disdaining

The relativity such a procedure would reflect.

You have never consciously rhymed

Line-endings, disdaining the seduction

Of the eye to poetic appearances.

You don't much go on alliteration, onomatopoeia,

Or assonance either, and one would look in vain

For a regular, heart-like metre.

You aren't a practitioner of belle-lettres,

For whom beauty, and hence aesthetics, is

Of consummate importance.

You know that, taken to extremes, beauty and truth

Are mutually exclusive, and that you

Can't get to the poetic truth of theocratic essence

By deferring to literary beauty.

Not that your poems are ugly!

Ugliness precedes beauty and is, in any case,

Incompatible with truth.

Your poems must be judged

On their own poetic terms, as expressions of

The highest theocratic truth.

Expressions, yes, but not impressions!

For you always approach truth

From a sort of anti-philosophical angle,

Not as a free-electron equivalent in pure spirituality.

You prefer to intimate of the Divine Omega

Indirectly rather than directly ... through

A contemplation-inducing impressive style.

Your metaphysical poetry is generally

In the freest free-verse style, yet it is still

Bound to appearances, and so

It must remain while you continue to preach.

It's just possible that you will evolve

To a still freer style in due course, the verse

More columnar, and hence transcendent, than ever before.

But will you abandon expression, turning

To abstract impression in a superpoetical salvation?