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Full disclosure: I don't enjoy poetry (even though I have written some that some others say they enjoy). Still I understand the appeal of poetry. At the least it can use rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration to paint a memorable or memorizable picture or to help you enter another's experience or viewpoint. Or it can be play, playing with words and sounds, or setting a mood, or perhaps drawing you into the riddle of what is even being meant. When asked what their lyrics refer to, some artists say that they don't know, it was just something that came to them, or that it is about something very personal and idiosyncratic that no one would be expected to understand.

Now prophecy can have poetic qualities (so as to be memorable), and many Old Testament prophecies are formatted in English as verse because in the original language they had rhythm, rhyme, or alliteration. But Scriptural prophecies are not presented to us by the Holy Spirit as poetry, not put forward to give us an experience, a mood, or a riddle. Rather they are telling our future, literally or with figures, and sometimes conditionally. Though they can be mysterious (some being hard to believe as destined to occur in history: "the lion shall lie down with the lamb"), they are serious, not fantasies or what-ifs.

If we could ask a prophet what event he was referring to, he too might say that he doesn't know, that it was something that came to him from God. So the presumption of scholars that we or they can commonly grasp what the author of a prophecy meant by it is, well, presumptuous. A case in point would be virtually the entire Book of Revelation. It is presented as a vision given to the apostle John. As such, it is no literary creation of his or of his community. He conveys the vision to us as it was given to him for our good, and we are left simply in awe, dumbfounded and hopefully open to our future therein.