Poetry vs Prose, and "The Miracle"

After reading "The Miracle" and "Tea with an Artist", I thought maybe I'd like to go back to poetry. Poetry, typically, has so many less words yet packs the same amount of meaning into itself. Prose is so full of words and pages. The reader has to discern what is valuable in these words and what is just there. If all the words have meaning, then the prose is even more difficult to understand. Poetry can be cryptic but there are usually so many less words to examine. "The Miracle" is full of dialogue and thoughts and actions to glean meaning from. One must consider word choice and a character's behavior and so many other things in order to try to interpret the story. "Tea with an Artist" was just generally odd and I'm still not sure what it meant. Let's have another poem.

The couple in "The Miracle" is such an odd couple. They are two scientists who are also newlyweds. Their behavior doesn't seem like that of  newlyweds. The story says that they were engaged for four years and married for one, yet the two have never discussed religion? And she doesn't know the stories of his past? And they don't speak to each other before breakfast? Not even casually? I'm not buying it. They don't behave like newlyweds or people in love. I want to know why they married each other. The wife thinks that he is ugly and she has to be careful not to injure his ego. She doesn't seem to think her husband is brilliant. She mostly enjoys observing his actions, but I don't know why. The only time during this story that they seem to display love is in the very last line, when the husband "with an ecstatic face...tiptoed to the head of the bed and now, bending down, he folded her in his arms." Even then, it sounds methodical rather than passionate.

I wonder how this story would change if the wife became the narrator. I would be interested to see how she would tell the story and how the details might be different. She is observing her husband, so the reader would probably still get the same level of detail about the husband. I think there would be more of her own thoughts expressed, and it would be more natural in that regard. However, the reader would lose the viewpoint and distance from the characters. As the story is, the reader looks in on a scene between husband and wife. If the wife narrated, the reader would be in the story, listening to the wife observe the husband. The story currently contains a lot of the wife's thoughts but they are filtered through the narrator first. I don't know which I would like better: being immersed in the story, or remaining the fly on the wall.