To clarify why I liked it, I find comfort in the fact that someone else has thought about the same existentially terrifying things as me. (I read the beauty-terrible complaint as one of the nature of nature, rather than of something we can change.) So when I think about such things, I'm less likely to feel quite as alone if I recall this poetry. Somehow reading other people's prose on the subject doesn't strike the same effect as poetry.

It [the poem] might not relate to consequentialist thinking that easily, but I found it a good antidote to the negative emotional effects consequentialist thinking has. I expect other people's mileage to vary; I have a specific personal set of philosophical neuroses, roughly identified as this sort of nihilism.

I've now upvoted your link to "Explaining vs. Explaining Away", by the way, because I think it serves, for me, the same function as the poem. I'm guessing you didn't have this reaction though?

I still get the same message from the repeated lines, that the complex systems behind the surface can't be beautiful, and are somehow innately terrible.

In context, the poet's meditation on death sounds like an eastern philosophy thing, in which case the surface/depth discussion is about dualities. To say that one thing is beautiful implies that something else is not. The poet is asking his beloved whether he is accepted completely, or only his surface parts.

To put it another way, given the context, I interpret it as saying that the division between surface and depth is what makes one terrible and the other beautiful. Together, the whole is neither ugly nor beautiful. (Note the poet's meditation on his own depth and death does not indicate that he thinks they are bad things.)

But of course, that's just, like, my opinion, man. ;-)