Poet Scott Cairns has written some revealing, thoughtful reflections as psalms to the Lord. Clearly, these poems are written for people who are not as awesome as we are. We have claimed our blessing and walk as strong as the Nephilim. We don’t grovel before the Lord, like the man in this poem:
“Idiot Psalm 1”
O God Belovéd if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind—while
apparently aloof—allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.
Doesn’t “enormity” mean something more like “profound evil”?
Maybe he knows that and it’s some sort of sly irony? If I were a Sensitive Poet I might understand these things better.
I took it to mean large or enormous. Looking it up, I see that as a alt #1 definition, even though the first and second definitions touch on crime or sin, like you say. The dictionary also notes that contemporary usage has been influenced by “enormous.”