Much of Way Out in the Centre is intent on disclosing the predicament of being both a doctor and a poet. At times it is movingly personal as in "X-ray" and "A Winter Visit", both of which concern a physician's attitude to his ill and aged mother. Abse writes of wanting to cry but being prevented by a professional familiarity with illness and grief: "for I inhabit a white coat not a black / even here—and am not qualified to weep." One vocation complicates the other.

Affecting in itself as his dilemma is, Abse is concerned to take it further in a way which seems to assert poetry over medicine. The last lines of "A Winter Visit" appear to offer his compensatory and intuitively poetic embodiment of escape from what is too much before him as experience:

     So I speak of small approximate things,
     of how I saw...