Scanlon begins with a bleak little equation: "Digital data are words without meaning." From there the poem climbs a ladder. Raw data gain a "narrow context" and become information. Information, in turn, gives way to poetry, which the poem calls "data with a meaning." The central idea is that meaning is not a property of words themselves but something that happens when human experience flows into them. The poem's last move is to say what that meaning finally is, and the answer is not an idea or a fact but love.
The construction is the best way into the poem. The first stanza makes a claim about information, and the second repeats it almost word for word for poetry. "Information, meaning within his narrow context" becomes "Poetry, meaning within her narrow context." The small changes are the interesting part. "Ways expressed in our goings-on together" turns into "Ways expressing all of our goings-on." The passive becomes active, so the ways are no longer simply described but do the expressing. "Together" drops out, while "all" arrives. Giving information a "his" and poetry a "her" is also striking. The poem never explains it, but judging by where it ends up, the two seem to be set side by side as a pair, with love as the thing that joins them.
Between the two stanzas sits a single line, "Poetic words are data with a meaning:", and the colon works like a hinge. The repetition that follows can feel heavy, but it suits the subject. Data are repeated, copied and stored, and the poem imitates that. This makes the final change land harder, because the refrain "Where the meaning is always elusive" has been heard twice before the poem breaks it.
That refrain is itself odd. Each "Where…" clause is a fragment that never attaches to a main sentence, so meaning sounds like a place we keep failing to arrive at. The word "elusive" also haunts the poem in other forms: "Elusively expressing" in each stanza, then "Elusiveness disappears" near the end. The third stanza finally supplies the missing condition: "When truth and beauty emerge in words." Here "Digitally" returns, now as an adverb: "Digitally transformed with our human passion." The word from the title and the opening line is not abandoned but changed, with the cold technical vocabulary filled with something human. Even the phrase "human passion" sits awkwardly against "digitally," and that friction seems deliberate.
The poem is careful about how much it promises. Elusiveness disappears only "for that moment," so clarity is brief. The next line begins with "As," which can mean "while" or "because," so our ways are clear either during that moment or as a result of it. Then comes the last line, and with it the swap: "Where the meaning is always love." One word replaces "elusive," and the line keeps the same frame and the same confident "always." The two words even share their "l" and "v" sounds, so it is easy to hear love hiding inside "elusive."
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are uneven, and the early ones are long and clotted with abstract nouns like "information," "context" and "expressing." That dry, officious texture is part of the point, because the poem sounds like data before it sounds like poetry. There is almost no concrete imagery. The only homely phrase is "goings-on," an everyday, slightly gossipy word that shrinks big ideas to the size of ordinary life, and it does the work a metaphor might do elsewhere. By the end the lines are shorter, and the last is built from plain words. The poem gets simpler as it gets closer to its answer.
What makes it worth reading is that it faces a very current worry, that a world of data might drain language of meaning, and answers without rejecting technology. It does not say that digital words are bad. It says they are incomplete until truth, beauty and passion pass through them. The poem also admits that meaning stays "elusive" most of the time. Its claim is modest and a little startling: when meaning does come clear, what we are seeing is love.