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The core vision of the poem is one of the spiritual heart assailed by the negative forces around it Thus the nucleus of the poem is a single word:

heart

A noun Characterise the heart and it becomes

pure heart
heart of purity

Here the poet must make a lexical choice. The noun head plus the adjective is compact but lacking in the kind of energetic tautness the poet is seeking. The subjective genitive, while making the identification between "heart" and "purity" more explicit, loses strength in the connective "of." Suppress this connective, rearrange the words so that the object of comparison is subordinated to the subject (heart) and we have "purity-heart," a powerful fusion or constellation of ideas. By virtue of this identification, the quality of purity is dynamically transferred to the heart.

Around this compound are located two movements of attack: "Man's darkening thought" and the "ruthless destruction-dart." The "purity-heart" is "blighted" by one and "caught" by the other. It is a brilliant picture of the heart under siege. Everything in this little poem responds to the poet's perception of such a happening. Even on a phonemic level the heart is surrounded and trapped by the tightly clipped rhymes and pararhymes: "thought/blighted"; "-heart"/ "caught"/"-dart."

The dramatic context of the poem is significantly enhanced by the second compound noun: "destruction-dart." This form of compound noun operates in the manner of a simile, by establishing a comparative relationship between two objects in terms of a common property or common behaviour. Thus, at a certain point, the poet's awareness of the experience of destruction recognises its "dart-like" activity. However, the poet avoids a literal comparison of the two terms through the use of the comparative particle "like." He wishes to go even further and assert that such a high degree of identification exists between the thing to be compared (destruction) and the agent of comparison (dart) that they have become one: destruction is a dart. The very stroke of the action of destruction is realised in this doubling of the subject and fortified by the alliterative effect of the first letter in each word.