Mary F. C. Pratt starts in the middle of an argument, with a joke that is also a warning: "To hell (and I don't mean symbolically)". The title seems to play on "voluntary simplicity", the idea of choosing to live with less, and the poem answers by choosing the opposite. Its central claim is that a life reduced to bare explanation is poorer and, in a sense, less accurate than one that admits its layers, its mess and its mystery.
The opening rejections are built to sound brisk and irritable. "Simplicity, austerity, clarity" are tidy abstract nouns that rhyme in their endings, which is a little ironic, since the speaker is attacking neatness. The next line piles up adjectives ("minimalist, unadorned, / stark, stripped-down, zen-garden bare") until the list starts to feel cluttered itself. Then comes a run of "without" phrases: rooms without clutter, poetry without license, love without mystery. Each is followed by the reductive explanation the speaker wants to reject, delivered in a parenthetical aside: "the heart a pump, / the brain a computer–give me a break", "it's only hormones". The brackets sound like muttering under the breath. There is a nice wrinkle here. "The heart a pump" is itself a metaphor, so Pratt's complaint seems to be less about metaphor than about the flattening kind, the one that explains a thing by making it smaller.
The turn comes with "I want life intricate, elaborate, rich", and from there the poem stops arguing and starts piling things up. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no stanza breaks, so it arrives as one long block, and the sentences stretch down the page with the looseness of speech. The senses arrive one at a time: sound ("a hundred choirs / singing different music from a hundred balconies"), sight, taste ("salt and wine"), smell ("woods in spring"). Even weight gets a place: life should be "too heavy to hold in one hand". The choir image is particularly good, because it asks for noise that doesn't resolve into harmony, many voices competing and still somehow making one sound.
Layering becomes the poem's governing image. Sedimentary rock is "stacked with the history of oceans", and the forest floor holds "layer upon layer of mould, / last year's mat of leaf and fern". Pratt does not shy away from decay: the flowers push up "through rotting wood", so growth and rot are shown as partners. The best example is the line about a church built on a Roman temple, built on a Celtic shrine, built on a Neolithic tomb. The repeated "built on" makes the sentence itself pile up, stratum by stratum, and the tomb at the bottom reminds us that all this richness rests on death.
The poem then moves from landscape to the personal. The speaker's study holds "dolls and scripture commentaries, / ink pots, angels, rubber chickens", a list where the sacred and the silly sit side by side, and the rubber chickens save the whole thing from solemnity. The great house is where the poem's feeling for time becomes most human. The family names lengthen as we go back, "Grandma", "Great-grandpa", "Great-great Aunt Sophy", so that the language adds generations the way the house does. There are shadows here too. The "empty laudanum bottles slipped between the walls" suggest private troubles that were hidden rather than discussed, and the tree roots "cracking through the deepest dungeon" show nature quietly breaking up a place built for cruelty or confinement. Those are my inferences from the imagery, but they fit the poem's refusal to tidy anything away.
The ending is a quiet surprise. After choirs, temples and five-hundred-year-old roses, the poem stops on "a thousand pairs of tattered slippers kicked under the bed". It is humble, domestic and a little funny, and there is no grand summing-up, only a heap of worn things that were once used by real people.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It argues against disenchantment, against explaining the world until nothing is left to wonder at, and it does so by performing its case. The poem is itself crowded, specific and untidy, and it makes abundance feel like a more truthful way of seeing, not just a matter of taste.