Parable and poetry hit harder than prose

The lyrical imagery of poetry communicates more powerfully than any fact. Parables have a similar quality. Perhaps poetry shares the parable’s delay of the facts in favor of the story image. When the facts emerge, during or after the poem (or perhaps hours later), they hit the reader all at once. Prose tends to lay facts like bricks, one on top of the next, which distributes the truth’s weight over time; poetry piles all the bricks atop a board over the reader’s head, then removes the board at poem’s end to let them fall in a crushing cascade.

Speakers have attempted to describe the conditions of factory-workers who produce the shirts we wear and the phones we carry. Said speakers want to convince us that wasteful consumption fuels an oppressive system. Instead of statistics and pleading, what if the following poem were shared? (courtesy of The Economist)

    The packing area is flooded with light
    the iron I’m holding
    collects all the warmth of my hands
    I want to press the straps flat
    so they won’t dig into your shoulders when you wear it
    and then press up from the waist
    a lovely waist
    where someone can lay a fine hand
    and on the tree-shaded lane
    caress a quiet kind of love...

Historians remind us that war is bleak and brutal; to be remembered so we don’t repeat the horror. In one day, the 1st of July 1916, in the battle of the Somme, 40,000 British troops alone perished (Voices of the First World War). But that bare fact won’t make you queasy in horror like Dulce et Decorum Est:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
---
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
---
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
---
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
---
Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.