In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical, and suggests the book of Proverbs, as thus:
'What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song,
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath—his wife, his house, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none comes to buy,
And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.'
Nature is still an image accepted as an adequate symbol, and we get reminiscences here and there of the simpler, early work of Thel, for instance, in such lines as:
'And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for its flower and fruit,
Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array;
So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and bird and beast,
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.'
