By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Horror" imagines a bottomless cavern where the soul is questioned, then turns from stories of beauty into self-condemnation and the strange claim of having known angles.
The poem begins in shock, as if the scale of the void has exceeded anything the speakers had prepared themselves to face. Beauty belongs to an earlier story in which "she" began perfectly, but that ideal is shadowed by the line "No one worse than I." The source word angles, rather than angels, makes the closing witness feel geometric and askew, a partial form of recognition rather than easy consolation.
'Horror' opens on a scale no one braced for -- 'We didn't think / There would be / This huge of a cavern / A bottomless place / Where the soul / is questioned' -- and contrasts that abyss with a beloved who 'started / so perfect / in your stories / of beauty'. The speaker bottoms out in self-condemnation, 'No one worse than I / in this world', yet claims a crooked witness in the source spelling 'angles' rather than angels, 'when I have seen them'.