Time to Write: Imagery in Poetry

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.