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For instance, in older times we dressed and washed our dead and clothed them in beautiful clothes, and we watched them lying in their coffins. Today our dead disappear, leaving hardly anything but ashes. Another problem is that today we are bombarded with more pictures than we are made to handle. It is true, it says in Deliria, that our houses are warm today, our walls hold tight, we own a lot of things and we are clean etc. But in reality we are: "människor med själar stämda efter mörkret i en annan/tid, /nyss komna ur hus av trä med den bittersvarta smaken/av rök kvar i näsorna" (s.33) ["people with souls tuned to the darkness of another/time,/just come out of wooden houses with the bitter-black taste of smoke in the noses".
Kandre writes that we have become blind to important things in the world. Poetry is a way of making us aware of them. The pictures, riddles and mysteries of poetry can touch and change us and make us return to an earlier way of life. In Deliria the speaker turns to other poets and says that it is:
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[...] vår plikt att förse människan med bilder från vilka hon kan återvända till sitt forna liv [...].
Att fabricera bilder, gåtor, omständliga mysterier med vilka hennes ökande förmätenhet gentemot växterna och djuren kan krossas [...] (s.19)
[[...] our duty to provide mankind with pictures from which they can return to their former life [...].
To fabricate pictures, riddles, winding mysteries with which their increasing presumtuousness towards the plants and/the animals may be crushed [...]]
According to Deliria this can be done with poetry. By reading and writing poetry we can right our wrongs, see the mystery of the world, and even get directions to things that cannot be described with words, like in the poem which begins: "Det står inte att läsa om i någon enda bok för sidor och/papper kan inte hålla för sådant" (s.138) ["It cannot be read from any book because pages and/paper cannot hold for such matters"].
With the help of poetry we can connect ourselves to ourselves, to
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