I love this because it is a poem; our God is a poet. We humans are poets because God is a poet. A poem, in any language, contains not just information but also less precise but equally important emotion and beauty. It creates relationships between facts, content, feelings, and the whole. The meaning of individual words is expanded by their relationship to the other words, and to the experience of the reader. Beauty involves proportion, the senses, relationships between elements, novelty, etc.
In this true poem, Wisdom is personified as a woman, bringing in all the characteristics of the female: nurturing, beautiful, gentle, oriented toward persons and children and relationships, exciting, attractive. She is not herself hidden, but calls out to everyone who will hear her (though many refuse her.)
And she is fundamental to all things. She was with God before the beginning of creation, before the beginning of all our world. For this reason, some say that she represents the LOGOS, the Word, even Jesus in one of His pre-incarnate manifestations, though one cannot insist on this. But “she”, poetically, is “there” from before the beginning, and everything since is built upon her. She is therefore ultimately real; to know her is to know reality, what is really, really true. All of physics, all of biology are based upon her from the beginning; all our relationships as creatures are based upon her from the beginning. To be wise is to know and understand reality, what is real and actual. Wisdom is the bones and flesh of Reality. It reflects the Mind of the Creator, God.
Again, this is a poem, not a dissertation or a prose statement of theology. It suggests more than it explicitly says, and thus engages one’s whole mind and heart. I for one think Jesus is implied here, as He is the Logos, and according to John 1, “all things came into being through Him”. He also is “the creator’s daily delight, rejoicing before Him always, rejoicing in His inhabited world, and delighting in the children of man.” (Prov 8: 30-31)
Little Gidding 