Good poetry often misses its point with deliberate ease. Modern poets can tend to disguise their meaning behind an artifice of obscurity and erudition. It maybe clever, but its rarely wise. You often find, like the tombs of Muslim heroes of old, that there maybe an elaborately wrought coffin to view on the surface, but there is no body to be found within. It's symbolism is an empty one, an echo without a resonant chamber.
David Whyte's poetry, at its best, will never be found empty of meaning or potency. But neither is it weighed down in a clumsy, portentous or leaden way, nor by expressing itself within the easy understanding of a flowery sentiment. It is the embodiment of its depths that strikes you about Whyte's poetry. One that is never so obvious, that its understood in the moment, you grasp it and quickly move on. There is still an air of mystery in the elucidation to draw your return to it. Here poetry encapsulates, it strikes a vein of recognition like a vestigial bell.
Gaston Bachlard once described poetry as being like throwing a pebble into a deep pond - that it touches the depths before the ripples of it break the surface.
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