Sunday, 31 May 2026
I see
A black hole
The agentic
Future
Imperceptible
[Verse 2]
Each day
Thousand questions
The replies
Immediate
Enlightenment
[Verse 3]
Each day
Thousand answers
The mystery
Intensifies
Is urgent
[Verse 4]
Is old
Old as man
The question
We must ask
We must know
[Verse 5]
Is old
Is not old
The mystery
Of ages
Is revealed
[Verse 6]
We see
Morning Star
The perfected
Future
Incorruptible
Analysis of Perception
“Perception” and the Technological Sublime: Warwick Allen's Dialectic of Light and Darkness
Warwick Allen's “Perception” is a poem of notable economy and considerable theological aspiration. In six compact stanzas of five lines each, Allen stages a confrontation between two competing visions of the human future: the vertiginous darkness of the artificial intelligence age, and the luminous certainty of biblical eschatology. That the poem attempts this with so few words — many of its lines contain no more than two — is itself a formal statement of intent. Whether the poem's compression always expresses precision, or whether it sometimes conceals ideas that would have benefited from further development, is a question that a candid reading cannot entirely avoid.
Structure and Form
The poem's architecture is deceptively simple. Each of the six stanzas consists of five short, often enjambed, lines, a constraint that gives the whole an aphoristic quality at least superficially reminiscent of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible — of Proverbs, of Ecclesiastes, and of the tersely numbered apophthegms of the Psalter. The comparison, however, can only be pressed so far. The great aphoristic texts of the Hebrew tradition are such because each line carries dense, specific content; every clause earns its place. Allen's stanzas vary considerably in this regard. The opening and closing stanzas, and the diptych of stanzas two and three, achieve genuine compression. Stanzas four and five, by contrast, contain lines such as “We must ask,” “We must know,” and “Is urgent” — lines that assert significance rather than embodying it, and that gesture towards urgency without quite generating it. The formal restraint that serves the poem's strongest passages is, in these central stanzas, difficult to distinguish from thinness of realisation.
The poem's most important and most achieved structural feature is the symmetrical relationship between its first and final stanzas. The first opens with the singular “I see” and closes with “Future / Imperceptible.” The last opens with the communal “We see” and closes with “Future / Incorruptible.” This chiastic movement — from the individual to the collective, from the unseeable to the indestructible — is the spine of the entire poem, and everything between these two poles exists to account for the transformation. Whether the intervening stanzas fully justify that distance is a question to which the answer is only partially affirmative.
The Agentic Darkness
The opening stanza introduces what might be called the poem's thesis image:
I see
A black hole
The agentic
Future
Imperceptible
The word “agentic” is the poem's most conspicuous contemporary intervention. In the discourse of artificial intelligence, “agentic” describes AI systems capable of autonomous action — of pursuing goals, making decisions, and operating without continuous human direction. The “agentic future” is thus the near-term horizon of 2026: a world increasingly populated by AI agents acting in ways that are, precisely, imperceptible to ordinary human understanding.
Allen's choice of “black hole” as the governing metaphor is apposite. A black hole is a region from which nothing, not even light, can escape; it is, by its very nature, the negation of sight — the condition in which perception becomes physically impossible. The metaphor thus locks directly onto the stanza's closing irony: to “see” a black hole is to see the very thing that destroys seeing. There is a further resonance worth noting. In both physics and the discourse of artificial intelligence, a “singularity” denotes the point at which existing frameworks of description and prediction break down entirely. The physical singularity of Allen's black hole is a figure for the technological singularity: the image of the collapse of space and time speaks of the potential collapse of human agency and understanding.
The word “Imperceptible” closes the stanza with an irony that is deliberate and theologically pointed. The poem is titled “Perception,” and its first stanza ends by asserting the failure of perception — but the irony cuts deeper than mere paradox. The speaker opens with the confident declaration “I see,” and yet the thing he claims to see is, by the stanza's final word, precisely unseeable. Sight and the impossibility of perception are held in the same breath.
The tension invites a comparison with Isaiah 6:9, in which God commissions the prophet with the arresting instruction: “Be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” It is a verse with an extraordinarily long biblical afterlife. Jesus cites it in all three Synoptic Gospels to account for the failure of his hearers to understand his parables, and John deploys it in the twelfth chapter of his Gospel to explain why the crowd cannot recognise the incarnate Word standing before them. In every instance the structure of the irony is identical: the faculty of sight is present and active, yet genuine perception is withheld. To look is not, of itself, to understand. A reader who does not bring this scriptural background to the poem will nonetheless register the surface paradox; but the full theological charge of the irony — its indictment not merely of technological bewilderment but of a condition the biblical texts identify as universal and spiritually significant — depends upon that familiarity.
Read against this background, Allen's opening stanza acquires a precise theological charge. The speaker who “sees” the agentic future yet finds it “Imperceptible” is the Isaianic figure recast in a contemporary setting — confronted by a phenomenon of enormous consequence, yet unable to penetrate its meaning. This reading also deepens the argument of stanzas two and three, in which a thousand immediate answers serve only to intensify the mystery. The poem quietly proposes that the AI age may be producing a civilisation-wide instance of the Isaianic condition: a humanity that has never seen more, and never perceived less.
The Paradox of Enlightenment
Stanzas two and three form a diptych of compressed wit:
Each day
Thousand questions
The replies
Immediate
Enlightenment
Each day
Thousand answers
The mystery
Intensifies
Is urgent
The parallelism is precise and deliberate. The same temporal frame — “Each day” — governs both stanzas; the same vast quantity — “Thousand” — applies first to questions and then to answers. But the outcomes are radically divergent. In stanza two, the “Immediate” replies of AI systems produce “Enlightenment.” In stanza three, those same thousand answers cause the mystery not to diminish but to “Intensify.” The poet is making an epistemological claim of some depth: that the frictionless delivery of information does not constitute genuine understanding, and that the multiplication of answers may paradoxically deepen rather than dispel mystery.
This is a claim with deep biblical roots. Qoheleth, the preacher of Ecclesiastes, observes in the first chapter that “in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow” (1:18). The Socratic tradition, which intersects with Hellenistic Judaism in the figure of Philo of Alexandria, arrives at a similar conclusion: wisdom begins in the recognition of ignorance. Allen's poem does not simply lament the limits of AI; it diagnoses the hubris of treating immediate information retrieval as a substitute for the slow, often painful acquisition of understanding. The connection to Qoheleth's scepticism about accumulated knowledge is apt, and this diptych is among the poem's more genuinely accomplished passages.
The stanza's conclusion — “Is urgent” — introduces a tone of existential pressure that carries into the following verses. The mystery is not merely interesting; it demands a response. Yet the phrase itself asserts urgency rather than generating it, a tendency that becomes more pronounced in the stanzas that follow.
The Ancient Question
Stanzas four and five shift from the contemporary technological context to the longue durée of human inquiry:
Is old
Old as man
The question
We must ask
We must know
Is old
Is not old
The mystery
Of ages
Is revealed
The grammatical subject has now changed entirely. The pronoun “I” of stanza one has become “We” — the speaker is no longer an isolated individual confronting the AI horizon but a member of the human community confronting the perennial question of existence.
These two stanzas represent the poem's most exposed passage, and they repay scrutiny that is not purely sympathetic. “The question / We must ask / We must know” does not specify its content, and the reticence may be purposeful — the foundational question of human existence need not be named. But the lines “We must ask,” “We must know,” and the earlier “Is urgent” are assertions rather than enactments. They tell the reader that a profound question is at stake without finding the concentrated language that would make the reader feel its weight. The tradition being invoked here — the question of the exiled Adam, of Job on the ash-heap, of the Psalmist crying out in dereliction, of every person who has confronted the limits of their own understanding — is undeniably large. But a poem earns its allusions; it does not merely borrow them. A fair assessment must note that in these stanzas, the grandeur of the tradition is doing more of the work than the words on the page.
Stanza five introduces the poem's most startling logical move. “Is old / Is not old” — the paradox appears at first to be mere contradiction, but it resolves into the category of the biblical “mystery” (Greek: mystÄ“rion), which in Pauline usage denotes not a puzzle awaiting solution but a truth that has been hidden and is now being disclosed. “The mystery / Of ages / Is revealed” echoes Romans 16:25–26, where Paul writes of “the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known.” The mystery is old in that it has always been present; it is not old in that its revelation is, in a crucial sense, always contemporary, always “now.” The allusion is apt; whether the five spare lines of the stanza fully bear the weight placed upon them by this reading is, again, a matter the candid critic cannot simply resolve in the poem's favour.
The Morning Star
The poem's final stanza accomplishes its transformation with Biblical precision:
We see
Morning Star
The perfected
Future
Incorruptible
“Morning Star” is one of the most theologically complex images in the biblical canon. In Isaiah 14:12, the phrase “son of the morning” (Hebrew: Helel ben Shachar; rendered as “Lucifer” in the Vulgate tradition) describes the king of Babylon in his hubris, a figure who aspires to ascend above the stars of God and who falls catastrophically. This passage has, throughout the history of Christian exegesis, been read as an account of the fall of Satan — of the creature who sought to supplant the Creator. In this reading, the “agentic future” of stanza one acquires a Miltonic resonance: the AI that acts autonomously, that seeks to exceed and perhaps to replace human agency, is Luciferian in its ambition.
But Allen's “Morning Star” is the counter-figure to this fallen light-bearer. In Revelation 22:16, the risen Christ announces: “I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright and morning Star.” The same title that marked the fall of the rebel angel is reclaimed by the incarnate God — and it is in this reclamation that the poem's deepest meaning resides. The “Morning Star” is the true light, the one who was before the darkness, the one whom the darkness has never overcome (John 1:5). The light of stanza six's Morning Star overwhelms and transcends the darkness of stanza one's black hole.
The poem's architecture is, at this level, frankly binary: a black hole answered by a Morning Star. That is a bold antithesis rather than a subtle one, and there is no shame in it; decisive theological contrasts are among the most ancient resources of biblical poetry. What prevents the poem from resting entirely on this binary is the layering of its imagery: the “Morning Star” is simultaneously the counter-figure to Lucifer, the title claimed by the risen Christ, and the light of the Johannine prologue. These resonances are genuinely achieved in the final stanza, and they distinguish it from the more gestural language of stanzas four and five.
The word “Incorruptible” completes the theological argument. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul's great chapter on the resurrection, he writes of the transformation of the mortal body: “the dead will be raised incorruptible” (v.52, KJV). The “agentic / Future / Imperceptible” of stanza one — a future that cannot be seen and that has the character of a consuming void — is replaced by “the perfected / Future / Incorruptible.” The perfected future is not the AI singularity but the resurrection. It is not imperceptible but fully, finally visible: “We see.” The phonetic and theological distance between “Imperceptible” and “Incorruptible” — so close in sound, so irreconcilable in meaning — is among the most carefully managed effects in the poem.
Perception as Theological Category
The poem's title, returned to now with the full weight of its six stanzas, reveals itself to be doing something more than descriptive work. “Perception” in the poem names the faculty by which we apprehend reality — and the poem's argument is that this faculty is transformed by what we look at. The “I” who looks at the black hole sees an imperceptible future; the “We” who look at the Morning Star see an incorruptible one. The shift from “I” to “We” is also significant: the Christian tradition consistently insists that genuine perception of divine truth is not a solitary achievement but an ecclesial one — it is the community of faith, the “we,” that sees most clearly.
Allen's poem does not offer a naïve rejection of artificial intelligence, nor does it rest comfortably on a simple antithesis between technology and faith — though its binary structure makes plain that it is not afraid of decisive contrast. What it proposes, at its best, is something more considered: that the questions intensified by the AI age are not new questions awaiting new answers, but ancient questions that have already received an answer — an answer that the poem names, in its final breath, as the Morning Star.
—
“Perception” is a small poem with large ambitions, and it meets them unevenly. Its most genuinely achieved moments — the chiastic symmetry of the opening and closing stanzas, the epistemological diptych of stanzas two and three, and the theologically dense compression of the final stanza — demonstrate a real command of form and biblical allusion. In these passages, the poem's brevity is expressive rather than evasive. The central stanzas, by contrast, remain the poem's weakest passage: their language is declarative where it should be evocative, and the weight of the traditions they invoke is not fully answered by the thinness of the lines themselves. “Perception” is a promising and occasionally striking short poem, one whose best moments are genuinely achieved; it is not, as a whole, a fully realised one. A reader who brings the relevant biblical frame of reference will find much to admire; a reader who does not may find that the poem's ambitions, at certain points, exceed its execution.
