Why do poets use imagery as
often as
they do? It’s a way of extending or emphasising the theme of a poem and to
illuminate its meaning. The hope is that the reader will respond to an image in
a way that’s impressed on memory or evokes a spontaneous feeling or emotional response.
Thinking comes later, though use of the intellect can be bound into the imagery
used. Most poets use visual or auditory imagery, but taste, touch and smell are
frequently to be found. One thing is certain: all poems use imagery, even if they
are only describing everyday surroundings or events. By the time the latter
have passed through the mind, leaving their impressions, and are later recalled
to be written up, or tussled with, they have become images.Images can be called up from the imagination, arise from the everyday or remembered environments, impressions and events, or bring into sharp focus choices made by way of the five senses. They can stand alone, as in descriptive poems, or be used as vehicles to convey the poet’s inner thoughts, feelings and responses so that the reader has to flick between the image and the poem’s meaning in order to penetrate to the poem’s heart. They can also be used in attempts to describe the indescribable. Religious poetry frequently uses the latter, the poet knowing that only imagery can open out, however imperfectly, spiritual experience. In effect, images in poetry help readers to halt for a moment in their attempt to transcend ordinary and often bypassed observations. Poets’ skills lie in how they best evoke these reactions.
To do this, poets have a number of
literary devices to hand. Symbol is one such, being an overarching device to
which the meaning of a poem is tied. Its connection to the theme of the poem is
often hidden, so that the reader is left to work out how and why a particular
symbol is used. This is clear in Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” where the sea
is used as a symbol to unfold the melancholy of human existence that only love
can mitigate. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in County Wexford” shows a symbol
used in much the same vein, though the theme is different; mushrooms reflect
how the weak of the world react to troubles and injustice as well as to
cataclysmic life events. The poem can be read as a comment on then contemporary
political events in Northern Ireland – the Troubles. Both poems gain their
strength through the sustained use of their chosen symbol and the layering of
meaning that ensues.
Symbol has some overlap with the
metaphor, though the latter is most often shorter; a number of them may occur in the same poem. Metaphors, like their big
sisters, also make a comparison between what may be two or more unrelated
objects; the conjunction is often implicit, deliberately not spelled out. This
can be seen in John Keats’ “When I have
Fears that I may Cease to Be,” in which he faces impending death through the
use of more than one metaphor. It’s also present in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116,
“Let Me not to the Marriage of True Minds,” where, through similar usage of the
device, he explores the endurance of love. Ultimately, the use of either symbol or metaphor is a type of hidden literary
pun as either compares two objects often unrelated in real life, though they may
have comparable attributes.
Simile is much more obvious, and, in
some ways, less subtle, in its constant use of “as,” “than” or “like” in order
to make direct comparisons. As such, it’s unlike, though allied to, symbols and
metaphors where the object of poetic usage is to make tangential or initially
unobservable couplings between two objects. One such example is Robbie Burns’ “A
Red, Red Rose,” in which he directly compares his lover to a rose and a melody;
she’s to be revisited as long as time and love last. Another who often uses
similes is Shakespeare; in “Othello,” Desdemona is compared to alabaster and,
later, Othello and Emilia converse, using similes of water and fire. However, unless
judiciously used and the poet means them to be forceful, similes can strike
like a bludgeon.
There are other sub-categories that
come under the heading of symbol or metaphor. Hyberbole, metonymy and antithesis
are less often used today. I won’t go into them here, but feel that they need
to be noted, if only in passing.
A further category is allegory, the
telling of a poetic fable or tale that, in a hidden way, is a narrative used in
order to compare it with a sequence of contemporary events, or life’s journey. Unlike
the symbol, though they are connected, the allegory tells an extended tale. Such
is the case in William Langland’s “Piers Plowman,” where the dreamer, Will, goes
on a journey to discover how to live a Christian life and avoid temptations. It
can be seen, too, in the satirical allegory, “Hudibas,” by Samuel Butler, a
tale in heroic couplets about a knight’s experience of, among other sects, the Puritans,
Presbyterians and Roundheads at the time of the English Civil War. The allegory
isn’t much used in contemporary poetry; it’s difficult to sustain what is
basically a lengthy device used for serious or satirical purposes.
Personification is a technique by
which an object stands in for human experience. The object often speaks,
experiences or acts as a human being would. There is an example in “Loveliest of
Trees, the Cherry Now,” by A. E. Housman, in which he stands the cherry dressed
in white for Easter alongside his aging self and still finds delight in its
blossoming. Then there is the passage in
T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” where, at its start, April is seen as the
cruellest month; the poem later segues into a commentary on contemporary life
and the poets’ state of mind, drawing on many literary and philosophical
traditions. In one sense, personification acts very like hyperbole in that it
exaggerates an unusual condition to startling effect.
The use of the sub-set archtypes in
poetry is most closely allied to the use of symbols; they are often called
universal symbols and are derived from the unconscious. They can be found in a
theme such as death, or in a character, often mythological, who portrays some
universal human trait. Milton’s Satan in “Paradise Lost” is one such; the
Fallen Angel is an archetype of man separated from his God. The archetype of
The Lovers is very apparent in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” star-cross’d
and tragic, and much of which play, incidentally, is written as poetic blank
verse.
All the above are only vehicles
to carry the images. So where do images
themselves come from? The imagination, life, intellectual pursuits, emotions, impressions and observations
constitute the short answer. But paying attention to those is a process of
learning. It’s why many beginning poets go to workshops and/or buy “Teach-Yourself”
books that give out creative exercises to kick-start the process of imagination
and observation, both internal and external. These can be useful as prompts while
learning the craft, or to turn to in dry spells. Ultimately, though, the most compelling
images, the ones to come across most genuinely on the page, are those that poets
discover and investigate for themselves. That may lead to certain themes being
resurrected and recurrently explored, or not, if the poet is pushed to explore
many themes during a lifetime of writing. However they acquire them, when
editing time comes round, poets polish and hone their images to fit with as
much care as they treat the poem’s theme. It’s a truism that all poems contain
images. It’s not a truism that they arrive on the page spontaneously, or extremely
rarely, anyway. Like all aspects of poetry, conjuring appropriate images that both
affect the reader and delineate the poet’s viewpoint amounts to hard work.
