Whether or not symbols are ‘true’, understanding them may add rich dimensions of useful and creative experience to life and thought. If, however, they are ‘believed’, they become objects of religious significance — certainties that remake our minds or lives in their image. Poetry is not a fact, and does not make truth claims, but it nonetheless has an effect upon and relationship with the nature of truth. Symbolism is, in some ways, similar. It invites us into new aspects and modes of intimacy without concretizing them as objects of fact or trade, and coincidence has something deeply in common with this.