Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hare

Calling poetry a "key" flatters it with utility, then immediately complicates what that utility is. A key doesn’t create meaning; it grants access. David Hare, a playwright obsessed with the gap between public language and private reality, is arguing that nature already speaks - just not in a dialect prose can easily bargain with. "Hieroglyphics" lands as a sly rebuke to the modern habit of treating the natural world as either sentimental scenery or a spreadsheet of resources. Hieroglyphs are dense, visual, symbolic; they require interpretation, training, patience. In other words: attention.

The intent isn’t to romanticize poets as mystics. It’s to defend a mode of knowing that admits ambiguity without collapsing into vagueness. Science decodes mechanisms; poetry decodes experience. Hare’s subtext is that we’ve become functionally illiterate in the face of what’s right in front of us: weather, bodies, landscape, time. The world keeps sending signals; we keep demanding plain speech.

The line also carries theatrical DNA. A playwright works in layered signs - gesture, silence, subtext, rhythm - the same semiotic messiness implied by "hieroglyphics". Nature, like a good stage picture, communicates through pattern and juxtaposition more than through statement. Poetry becomes the interpretive instrument that turns sensation into comprehension.

In context, coming from a late-20th/early-21st-century British writer shaped by political argument and media noise, the claim reads as cultural resistance: reclaiming metaphor and lyric precision as tools for reality-testing, not escapism.