Canis Molestus Warwick Allen Saturday, 20 June 2026
There once was a dog with a terrible habit He'd run off to chase chooks and many a rabbit He'd return at dawn Face his master's scorn But the next chance he'd get, he'd be right back at it
[Verse 1] On bones so bold, On clear display, The skin does fold, 'Tis sickly grey. An ounce of gold For bread won't pay, And hunger's cold, In this dread day.
[Echo 1] The ill favoured and leanfleshed kine Consumed The seven well favoured, fat kine.
[Refrain 1] Is past retold, Or future hoped? Can now be told, Will neck be roped? But this we hold, The words they wrote; The words are old, But now invoked.
[Verse 2] The rain's been driv'n, Far from our eye; We look to heav'n, The empty sky, But nought is giv'n, Despite our cry, In time of sev'n, This day of dry.
[Echo 2] And the withered, thin and blasted Devoured The seven rank and full and good.
[Refrain 2] Is past retold, Or future hoped? Can now be told, Will neck be roped? But this we hold, The words they wrote; The words are old, But now invoked.
[Verse 3] The line we toe, To scarce survive. It's hard to know, Are we alive? This life's so low, Yet we still strive. O where to go For souls to thrive?
[Echo 3] The famine over men prevailed Fields they sold And so the land became the king's.
[Refrain 3] Is past retold, Or future hoped? Can now be told, Will neck be roped? But this we hold, The words they wrote; The words are old, But now invoked.
[Verse 4] In ash and dust, We offer tears; In woes unjust, Through shackled years, We do what must To persevere. We stand, we trust, In face of fear.
[Echo 4] As for the people, he removed To cities From borders' end to other end.
[Refrain 4] Is past retold, Or future hoped? Can now be told, Will neck be roped? But this we hold, The words they wrote; The words are old, But now invoked.
[Verse 5] When spirits thin And hearts do grieve, No hope to win, But by His leave, We'll look to Him, The seed of Eve, Who owns the wind, And sea He cleaves.
[Echo 5] And ye shall know the LORD your God, Which bringeth You out from under Egypt's rod.
[Refrain 5] The past says well, It gives right scope. Yes, now we'll tell, And risk the rope! No buy nor sell, But we can cope; And save from hell, By words of hope.
[Verse 6] An end will come, To days of night; We'll see the One, Who makes us right. Dark days are done, Now bathed in light. We'll see the Son, In all His might.
[Echo 6] We sing unto the LORD, for He Hath triumphed: The horse and rider hath He thrown.
[Coda] The past is old, Our future gain; All now is told, Who overcame; A crown we hold, And new our name. The Word extolled, With Him we reign.
The poem’s title, “Time of Seven,” announces at once its central biblical
preoccupation: the seven years of famine foretold in Pharaoh’s dreams as
interpreted by Joseph in Genesis 41. It is a work self-consciously addressing
the present through the lens of antiquity.
Form and Structure
The poem’s most impressive feature is its architectural complexity. It is
organised into six numbered verses, six biblical “Echoes,” five refrains (of
which the fifth is significantly modified), and a concluding Coda. The
repeating pattern — Verse → Echo → Refrain — mimics the call-and-response
structure of liturgy, or more precisely the antiphonal tradition of Hebrew
psalmody, and this is clearly intentional given the poem’s deep investment in
the Hebrew Bible.
The Verses
Each verse is eight lines of iambic dimeter — two iambic feet per line, giving
four syllables — with an unbroken ABABABABAB alternating rhyme scheme running
throughout. This is a notably compressed and demanding form. The
relentlessness of the alternation, combined with the short line, produces a kind
of percussive monotony that is tonally apt: famine is, above all, repetitive and
wearing. The elisions throughout (“driv’n,” “heav’n,” “giv’n,” “sev’n”) are not
merely metrical conveniences but are consistent with the poem’s deliberate
invocation of archaic, King James–register English.
The rhymes are largely clean and semantically purposeful. In Verse 1, for
instance, “gold” placed alongside “cold” implies the futility of wealth in a
time of famine—a compression that is genuinely effective. Each verse sustains
its ABABABABAB scheme with integrity: “bold/display/fold/grey/gold/pay/cold/day”
in Verse 1; “driv’n/eye/heav’n/sky/giv’n/cry/sev’n/dry” in Verse 2; and so
forth. The pairings carry semantic weight beyond mere formal necessity.
The Echoes
The three-line Echoes are the poem’s most distinctive structural device. Each
is set in italics and drawn from the King James Version of the Bible, arranged
as a tricolon in which a central hinge line of one or two words is bracketed by
two octosyllabic lines. The effect is that of a voice breaking in from the
past—or, given the poem’s deliberate temporal ambiguity, from timeless Scripture
itself. The single-word pivots of the first two Echoes (“Consumed,” “Devoured”)
carry remarkable compression: the force of the devouring is borne by a word
standing entirely alone, as if that word is all that survives the catastrophe it
names.
The Refrain and Its Modification
Refrains 1–4 are identical and function as a sustained hermeneutical question:
“Is past retold, / Or future hoped?” The question refuses to fix the poem’s
meaning to any single historical moment. This is the poem’s sharpest
intellectual move. It advances a typological sensibility—the claim that the
“time of seven” is not merely an episode from Genesis 41 but a recurring pattern
in human history, and perhaps a foretaste of eschatological events yet to come.
The rhyme scheme of the refrain is worth examining. The A rhymes
(“retold/told/hold/old”) are perfectly consistent, but the B
rhymes—“hoped/roped/wrote/invoked”—are not. “Hoped” and “roped” rhyme exactly;
“wrote” and “invoked” are only approximate rhymes. Whether this loosening is
intentional, representing a weakening of formal certainty before the poem’s turn
toward hope, cannot be determined from internal evidence alone, but the effect
exists regardless.
The fifth refrain is where the poem’s argument turns decisively. The
questioning tone of Refrains 1–4 is resolved: “The past says well, / It gives
right scope. / Yes, now we’ll tell, / And risk the rope!” The monosyllabic
“Yes” is the pivot of the entire poem. The willingness to “risk the rope”—which
in the earlier refrains had been a source of fearful uncertainty—is now embraced
as the acknowledged cost of proclamation. This structural decision is among the
most effective in the poem.
Biblical Intertextuality
The sequencing of the Echoes reveals careful theological thinking. They trace a
coherent narrative arc across four books of the Hebrew Bible and into the New
Testament.
Echoes 1 and 2 are drawn from Genesis 41, Pharaoh’s two dreams: the seven lean
kine consuming the seven fat kine, and the seven withered ears devouring the
seven full ears. The KJV language is preserved faithfully (“ill favoured,”
“leanfleshed,” “rank and full”).
Echoes 3 and 4 advance to Genesis 47, the social consequences of the famine
Joseph had predicted: the people sell their land to Pharaoh, and are relocated
to the cities. The narrative has moved from prophetic warning to brutal
realisation; Egypt, through Joseph’s administration, has consolidated absolute
power over a displaced and impoverished populace.
Echo 5 marks the theological pivot. The verse quoted—“And ye shall know the
LORD your God, / Which bringeth / You out from under Egypt’s rod”—is drawn from
Exodus 6:7, God’s promise to Moses before the plagues. The word “Egypt” here
carries doubled resonance: it is at once the historical Egypt of slavery and the
poem’s symbol of any political or economic system that reduces human beings to
instruments. Crucially, the same Egypt that benefited from Joseph’s famine
management has become the Egypt from which God must deliver his people—an irony
the poem allows the sequence of Echoes to imply, without spelling it out.
Echo 6 concludes with the Song of Moses from Exodus 15:1—the triumphant hymn
sung after the crossing of the Red Sea. The movement from Genesis 41 to Exodus
15 is a movement from famine and displacement to deliverance and song.
The Coda then opens into the language of Revelation: the new name (Revelation
2:17), the crown (Revelation 2:10), reigning with Christ (Revelation 22:5), and
the identification of Christ as the eternal Word (John 1:1). The typological
arc is thus Genesis → Exodus → Revelation: the same divine pattern of judgment,
preservation, and ultimate redemption cycling at an eschatological scale.
The Verses in Detail
Verse 1: The Physical Crisis
Verse 1 establishes the literal, bodily reality of famine. Greying skin “On
bones so bold, / On clear display” presents emaciated bodies as a spectacle—not
hidden but openly visible. The paradox of “bold” bones (exposed, prominent)
conveys both physical reality and a kind of terrible dignity. The final
couplet—“An ounce of gold / For bread won’t pay”—with its nod to Ezekiel 7:19,
reduces economic value to absurdity. Wealth becomes meaningless; the poem
establishes at once that this is not merely a material crisis but an ontological
one.
Verse 2: The Environmental Failure
Verse 2 shifts from bodies to the heavens. “The rain’s been driv’n, / Far from
our eye” personifies drought as an active force of withdrawal. The “empty sky”
becomes the focus of desperate prayer (“We look to heav’n, / The empty sky, /
But nought is giv’n, / Despite our cry”), and the title phrase of the “time of
sev’n” anchors the catastrophe to the biblical time-scale. The verse
establishes that this famine is cosmic in scope—not a local failure but a
universal withholding.
Verse 3: The Existential Question
Verse 3 is the poem’s turning point toward theology. It opens with the survival
narrative (“The line we toe, / To scarce survive”) and then poses the essential
question: “Are we alive?” This is not a tautology but a genuine inquiry into
whether mere biological existence constitutes life in any meaningful sense. The
acknowledgment “This life’s so low, / Yet we still strive” is not resignation
but a statement of continued persistence despite everything. The closing
question—“O where to go / For souls to thrive?”—introduces the language of the
soul and pivots the poem toward a spiritual rather than merely material answer.
The “O” carries an exclamatory, lamenting quality that suits the emotional
register. Crucially, this question is one the poem is structurally committed to
answering: the reply arrives in Verse 5 (“We’ll look to Him, / The seed of Eve”)
and the theological resolution unfolds through Echo 5 and the Coda.
Verse 4: The Communal Endurance
Verse 4 is more austere and less visionary. It emphasises communal persistence
rather than hope: “In ash and dust, / We offer tears.” The verse acknowledges
injustice and restrictions (“In woes unjust, / Through shackled years”) but does
not yet point beyond them. Instead, it states what must be done: “We do what
must / To persevere.” The closing couplet—“We stand, we trust, / In face of
fear”—is presented as a statement of fact rather than as achieved faith. The
trust is declared but not yet grounded in revelation. Echo 4, which follows,
shows the social upheaval Joseph’s famine administration produced: the people
are “removed / To cities,” relocated from “borders’ end to other end.” Verse 4
thus sits between the lament of Verse 3 and the theological revelation of Verse
5.
Verse 5: The Spiritual Pivot
Verse 5 transforms the poem’s trajectory entirely. It moves from the question
“Where do we go for souls to thrive?” to an answer: “We’ll look to Him, / The
seed of Eve.” This is the poem’s most overtly theological moment. The phrase
“seed of Eve” refers to Genesis 3:15, the Protoevangelium—the first messianic
promise in Scripture, identifying the coming deliverer as one who will crush the
serpent’s head. By invoking this in the context of a famine poem, the author
aligns deliverance from hunger with the cosmic redemption promised from the very
beginning. The descriptions that follow—“Who owns the wind, / And sea He
cleaves”—compress references to Exodus 14 (the parting of the Red Sea) and the
New Testament accounts of Christ stilling storms. The verse establishes that
the answer to the question posed in Verse 3 is Christ—the incarnate Word who
unites all the salvation narratives from Genesis through Exodus to the eschaton.
Echo 5 confirms this with God’s promise to Moses: “And ye shall know the LORD
your God, / Which bringeth / You out from under Egypt’s rod.”
Verse 6: The Eschatological Vision
Verse 6 completes the arc by opening fully into the future. “An end will come,
/ To days of night” promises resolution. The repetition of “We’ll see”
twice—“We’ll see the One, / Who makes us right” and “We’ll see the Son, / In all
His might”—anticipates the beatific vision. The movement from “dark days” to
light is complete. The reference to the one “Who makes us right” joins the
justification aspect of the promised salvation to the already-established
physical aspect. Echo 6, drawn from the Song of Moses (Exodus 15:1), celebrates
the ultimate triumph: “We sing unto the LORD, for He / Hath triumphed: / The
horse and rider hath He thrown.” This echo mirrors the structure of the poem as
a whole—the famine narratives of Genesis 41–47 find their resolution in the song
of deliverance from Exodus 15.
The Coda: The Crowning Promise
The Coda offers the final word. It returns to a cleaner ABABABAB rhyme scheme
(old/told/hold/extolled paired with gain/overcame/name/reign) with a shift from
the minor B rhyme sounds of the refrains (“hoped/roped/wrote/invoked”) to the
more triumphant “-ain” sound of “gain/overcame/name/reign.” This sonic shift
reinforces the thematic triumph. “The past is old, / Our future gain” states
the typological lesson: what was is now reinterpreted as promise. “All now is
told, / Who overcame” declares that the victory is already (in the
eschatological sense) accomplished. “A crown we hold, / And new our name”
invokes Revelation 2:10 and 2:17—the promise of a crown and a new name. “The
Word extolled, / With Him we reign” identifies Christ as the Word (Logos) of
John 1:1 and promises the believer’s participation in his reign (Revelation
22:5). The poem thus ends not with hope deferred but with present possession
(“we hold,” “we reign”).
Thematic Analysis
The poem’s animating argument is typological: the events of Genesis 41–47 are
not merely a record of a past famine in ancient Egypt but a “type,” in the
theological sense, of any period of civilisational collapse, and ultimately a
figure for the eschatological tribulation of Revelation. The poem does not
argue this discursively; it enacts it through its formal structure and through
the sequencing of its biblical Echoes, refusing throughout to anchor itself to a
specific historical moment.
This typological sensibility answers the central question posed by the refrain:
“Is past retold, / Or future hoped?” The poem’s answer is both. The past is
retold not for its own sake but as a pattern; the future is hoped for because
that pattern has already been written in Scripture and requires only
eschatological fulfilment. The temporal ambiguity of the refrain is resolved by
the logic of typology: what happened to Joseph’s Egypt is happening now and will
happen again at the end of history. The poem thus functions as a kind of
spiritual diagnosis and prognosis: it identifies present suffering within the
biblical pattern of famine and deliverance, and it locates present hope within
the eschatological promise.
The movement of the Echoes from Genesis to Exodus to Revelation enacts this
typological reading. The famine of Genesis 41–47 becomes a figure for all
famines, all displacements, all moments when economic systems reduce human
beings to instruments. The exodus from Egypt becomes a figure for all
deliverance. The consummation promised in Revelation becomes the end toward
which all intermediate deliverances point.
Weaknesses
The poem is not uniformly flawless. Two minor imperfections warrant mention.
In Verse 5, the grammatical subject shifts somewhat awkwardly. The verse opens
with a communal “we”—“When spirits thin / And hearts do grieve”—before pivoting
to a description of the deliverer: “Who owns the wind, / And sea He cleaves.”
The pronoun “He” does not follow cleanly from “Him” three lines earlier; a
reader must navigate the syntactic gap with a small but noticeable effort. The
meaning is recoverable, but the construction is not entirely fluent.
The near-rhymes in the refrain’s B position—“hoped/roped/wrote/invoked”—persist
as a potential weakness, though they may be intentional. “Hoped” and “roped”
rhyme exactly; “wrote” and “invoked” are only approximate rhymes. Whether this
loosening is a calculated device representing a weakening of formal certainty
that precedes the confident resolution of Refrain 5 cannot be determined from
the text itself, but the effect is present regardless.
Conclusion
“Time of Seven” is an ambitious and accomplished poem that largely succeeds on
its own terms. Its formal architecture—iambic dimeter verses interlocked with
italicised biblical Echoes and a repeated refrain whose fifth iteration breaks
and resolves the established pattern—is purposeful and well-executed. The
selection and sequencing of the Echoes is theologically sophisticated: the
movement from Genesis 41 through Genesis 47 to Exodus 6 and 15, concluding in
the Revelation-inflected Coda, traces a coherent eschatological argument that
the poem’s structure reinforces rather than merely illustrates.
The central hermeneutical question—“Is past retold, / Or future hoped?”—is the
poem’s most durable intellectual contribution. It refuses easy historical
localisation and instead advances a typological reading in which ancient Egypt
becomes a perpetual pattern, the Exodus becomes a perpetual promise, and the
present moment is understood as a type awaiting its antitype in Christ. The
poem’s resolution, offered through the modified Refrain 5 and confirmed in Verse
6 and the Coda, is that the answer to the refrain’s question is not either/or
but yes to both: the past is retold as a pattern, and the future is hoped for as
its eschatological fulfilment.
The few remaining weaknesses—a slightly strained pronominal reference in Verse 5
and some approximate rhyming in the refrains—are minor relative to the poem’s
overall ambition and theological coherence. The poem succeeds in doing what it
sets out to do: to read contemporary famine (whether literal or spiritual)
through the lens of Scripture, to insist that suffering follows a pattern
already written in the biblical narrative, and to ground hope not in optimism
but in the promise of an end to darkness and a participation in Christ’s
victory.
“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.
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.
Who Am I That I Should Go? Warwick Allen Tuesday, 21 April 2026
[Refrain] Set my people free.
[Verse 1] I cannot go, I am despised. My lips are uncircumcised. And my tongue, it's so clumsy. They won't listen, don't You see?
[Refrain] I will be with you. Set my people free.
[Verse 2] Surely not me, small and weak? Show it's You, by fleece of sheep. Wet the fleece and show it's true. I would go, just if I knew.
[Refrain] I will be with you. Set my people free.
[Verse 3] But, don't You know, I'm too young, A child with untried tongue. I do not know how to speak, My wisdom's poor, words are weak.
[Refrain] I will be with you. Set my people free.
[Verse 4] I'm no son of a prophet, A herdsman is all you've got, A fig dresser, nothing more. What could You use this man for?
[Refrain] I will be with you. Set my people free.
[Verse 5] Depart from me, I'm unclean, The most sinful man You've seen. Just an unschooled fisherman— How can I fulfil Your plan?
[Refrain] I will be with you. Set my people free.
[Coda] He said: go, make disciples From all lands, from all peoples. Baptize them, the name is one, Name of Father, Spirit, Son. Teach them to know and follow In the way He said to go. And behold, He is with us To the end of the ages.
