IMAGERY

We shall now examine the poet's use of images, figures of speech, and symbols--all of which are addressed to the imagination. The only link between the poet's mind and the reader's is the verbal performance, which is the poem. And this performance, although it happens in the mind, is remarkably physical in character. One reason for this is that poetic language carries an unusually high concentration of sensory images, of which the most frequent are, as might be expected, visual images.

However, poetic images draw upon all types of sense impressions--of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or bodily movement--which help the poem to transmit an experience of special intensity in memorable form. Thus, poetic language is deeply rooted in physical fact.
 

DIRECT AND FIGURATIVE IMAGERY

Poetic images are generally of two sorts: those that present sense data directly by literal statement and those that do this indirectly by figurative statement. The descriptive image (or direct image) builds an impression entirely out of sensory details. The figurative image (or metaphor) presents sensory data indirectly in the form of a comparison or analogy. Both types of images are used by the poet as his intentions require. Strong as the sensuous nature of a poem must be, the emotional and intellectual currents of the poem are of primary importance. The poet shapes his images for depth of feeling and meaning, not for mere physical sensation.

In Robert Browning's poem "Meeting At Night," a powerfully romantic mood is built almost exclusively by direct images which involve virtually all the senses. Only in the language of the third and fourth lines is there a hint of a metaphor in the implied analogy between waves and living creatures:

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
 

In "The Skaters" by John Gould Fletcher, direct images and metaphors are combined in a single dominant impression of ice-skating as flight--swift, sudden, intersecting, entangled lines of flight. Here, also, three or four different bodily senses are involved in bringing the scene to life.

Black swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves;
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface,
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.

Lines 3 and 4 are clearly examples of direct description. The other lines contain two figurative images, or metaphors. The attentive reader will perceive by the time he finishes the first sentence that the black swallows in the first line are the skaters. How are skaters like swallows? They swoop and glide, they execute loops and curves as they skate. By making this comparison (which is actually in the stronger form of an equation since it does not use like or as, or even are), the poet transfers the attribute of flight from the swallows to the skaters. (The Greek word metaphor means transfer.) It is precisely because a bird and a person are so different in so many ways that this carrying over of one characteristic that they have in common becomes effective. To make a metaphor the objects compared must be basically unlike each other.

The second figurative image in the poem is contained in the last two lines, where the actual sound, the "grinding click" of the skates, is compared to an imaginary sound (the sound that would be made by a flock of swallows if their wings were made of silver and they brushed their thin wing-tips together in flight). Apparently, Fletcher could not rest content with the direct image, the "grinding click," until he had associated with it another image of flight, thus fulfilling the expectation be had aroused in his first metaphor.

Until now, we have used the word metaphor as a general term to cover all images that are not literal, but figurative that is, all images that are based on a comparison, analogy, or association between dissimilar things.

KINDS OF METAPHOR

We now need to differentiate several classes of metaphor. The word metaphor is also used in a more limited sense to indicate a type of comparison in which unlike things are equated through the use of forms of the verb to be or similar verbs. The simile makes a comparison through the use of connectives such as like or as. Thus the second comparison in the previous poem may be called more specifically a simile. The poet often gains a more powerful effect by omitting such connectives.

A few more examples of similes and metaphors are drawn here from Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden". The poem is about a man finding himself in a rare state of happiness as he lolls in the solitude of a luxuriant garden. He feels as if his soul is parting from his body in an ecstasy.

Marvell might have said, "My soul is like a singing bird" (simile) or "My soul is a singing bird" (metaphor). Instead he wrote, "Casting the body's vest aside,/My soul into the boughs does glide:"

which is an implied metaphor. In the next line he went on with a simile: "There like a bird it sits, and sings," and then, carrying the figure of speech further he used an extended simile:

Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

Had Marvell left out the word "like," the lines quoted would comprise an extended metaphor. When the extended simile or metaphor becomes quite elaborate in a witty or intellectual way, it is called a conceit. When, on the other hand, the extended simile develops the description of the object used for comparison, rather than the object the comparison explains, the extended simile is called an epic simile. An example is Milton's description of the beauty of the garden of Eden:

Not that fair field of Enna,
Where Proserpine, gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th'inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive.

While the epic simile seems to wander off the subject, the myth by which the Greeks explained the seasons (the daughter of mother earth is held for part of the year in captivity by the Lord of the Underworld) is obviously emotionally and thematically supportive of the comparison of the two beautiful (but also doomed) gardens.
 

Personification is that form of metaphor which treats an object or an abstraction as if it were a person. Emily Dickinson transforms death into a courtly gentleman:

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.

In his poem "The Snowstorm," Emerson speaks of the north wind as a mad architect who builds a fantastic world out of snow:

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. . . .

Two related classes of metaphor, which create an equation or identity between a part of a thing and the whole or between two things connected in some way, are synecdoche and metonymy. Synecdoche uses the part for whole, as in the famous lines of Christopher Marlowe about Helen of Troy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

The term synecdoche may also be applied to the use of a special case in a generalized way as when a rich man is called a Rockefeller. The use of the name of one thing for that of another, closely associated thing is called metonymy, as in saying "the bottle" for "strong drink," or in referring to "the crown" when "the king" is meant.

At a high level of intensity, a metaphor goes beyond comparison and succeeds in creating an aura of transformation. An example of this is the following passage from Romeo and Juliet. Romeo, standing unseen for the moment beneath Juliet's window, has been smitten by the beauty of her eyes. The comparison of a lady's eyes to stars was an old one even in Shakespeare's day, but what happens in these lines goes beyond the ordinary simile or metaphor:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her bed?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.

The passage has some of the elaborateness of a conceit, but the main element here is not wit or intellect, as in a conceit, but passion. The imagination is made to leap across the gap between the image of eyes and the image of stars in such a way that a new entity comes into being: the eyes-as-stars. The line in which the transformation culminates is "Would through the airy region stream so bright." It is with language of such energy and radiance that the poet's "imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown."
 

FIGURES OF SPEECH

All the types of metaphorical language thus far dealt with may also be referred to as figures of speech, or tropes. Tropes are sometimes called "figures of thought," to distinguish them from poetic effects that depend on sound, which may be called schemes.

In addition, there are certain other tropes which are used by the poet to dramatize his ideas, but which are not strictly metaphorical. The figures we are about to present have in common the effect of contrast, contradiction, or surprise. The first, antithesis, places within one line or sequence of lines ideas that boldly oppose each other. Alexander Pope uses this figure frequently. Here in a couplet from Moral Essays Epistle II) he is satirizing the weaknesses of a certain eminent lady:

Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside,
A teeming mistress, but a barren bride.

Additional examples of antitheses are seen in these famous lines describing mankind from Pope's An Essay on Man:

Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

A similar figure of speech is paradox, a statement which seems to contradict itself, but which, on closer examination, reveals a truth. A paradoxical proverb is: "The longest way round is the shortest way home." John Donne combined passion and wit in such paradoxical lines as the following from "Batter My Heart,"  a sonnet addressed to God:

Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The oxymoron (from a Greek word meaning pointedly foolish) is a combination of qualities or ideas that seem absurd. This figure is not necessarily comic, however. It may be used to convey the straining of a mind trying to understand something beyond it, such as a religious mystery, or it may express the "heart's oppression" as in this outpouring of oxymoron from a love-stricken Romeo:

0 heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this. (I, i)

The last line of the above passage is paradox; all the previous epithets are oxymoron.
 

Another figure, hyperbole, expresses our natural tendency to exaggerate when excited. Hyperbole derives from the Greek word for "overshooting" or "excess." An example from ordinary speech is to say, "I'm dead," for "I'm very tired." Here is an example from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." From the point of view of a prosaic mind, all poetry is compounded of overstatements. But what the poet seeks in hyperbole, as in all figures of speech, is a new truth. He is, as A. R. Ammons says, "the listener/to lies that/they may become truth."

The figure opposite to hyperbole is understatement, also known as meiosis, which is another way of dramatizing a perception. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, when the unlucky Mercutio has received a fatal rapier wound and is asked if he is hurt, he replies, "Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry, 'tis enough." And a moment later, he says, "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve."

SYMBOLS

An image or figure of speech may be used by the poet in such a way that it acquires the force of a symbol. Sometimes a poem as a whole is endowed with this symbolic force. Since many of the poems in this collection are of a symbolic nature, and since we encounter symbolism throughout literature, it is useful to make clear just what the symbolizing process is.

To begin with, one should distinguish the conventional symbol from the literary one. In general, a symbol is any object, sign, or expression that stands for something other than itself, something more than itself. In this primary sense, every word is a symbol because it represents a meaning, something beyond its sequence of letters or sounds. A flag is a conventional symbol representing a nation, a government, a people, a history. A flag salute is a ritual or symbolic act. Giving a visitor "the key to the city" is another symbolic act. These and other conventional symbols and symbolic acts--a marriage ring, a cross, a handshake, a black arm band--carry ideas and emotions that are understood by everyone sharing a certain culture. Their meanings, because they are habitually observed, tend to be standardized.

The literary symbol, and more specifically the poetic symbol, is the creation of an individual artist. When most successful, it sends out many rays of meaning rather than a single established meaning. An analysis of William Blake's "The Sick Rose" indicates how a very vivid, definite image of a worm destroying a rose gives off a cluster of suggestions, powerful though ambiguous. Does the worm represent death, or envy? Is this an account of a betrayal or a self-abandonment? Each reader may settle on the interpretation that seems most compelling, but he remains aware of other possibilities. The most effective poetic symbols convey the necessity of further exploration and discovery.

Very often it is in the beings or forces of nature that poets find their most moving symbols. To take another example from Blake, his poem "The Tiger" goes far beyond our usual image of the tiger's ferocity and beauty. As we read, we are compelled to feel that we are being shown an awesome tigerishness at the heart of existence, and "forests of the night" that exist not in India or Africa, but in the human being. In D. H. Lawrence's "Snake," we meet a yellow-brown snake who is no less than "a king in exile" and "one of the lords,/ Of life." With Lawrence, explicit comment and a very casual style may actually detract from the intensity of the symbol, which is nevertheless clear. The wind that Shelley invokes in his "Ode to the West Wind" is much more than a meteorological phenomenon. The tide that Longfellow describes in such appropriate rhythms in "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" belongs more to human life than to marine lore.

In their eagerness to grasp the symbolism in poems, inexperienced readers may make two mistakes. They may concentrate on symbolism and forget the concrete reality of the poem, which is to be enjoyed in and for itself and not as a problem needing solution. Or they may become a symbol-hunter who tries to uncover symbols where they do not exist. To avoid both of these errors it is necessary only to respect the poem, to read and reread it closely, and to let it lead us where it plainly wants us to go.

It will not do, for instance, to force symbolism on John Clare's "Badger," which is as straightforward as a good news report. We can draw our own conclusions about the badger and the people who hunt him, but the badger remains very much himself throughout the poem and so do his hunters. Tennyson gives his eagle some human qualities, as if to draw us closer to him but, essentially, not to make the eagle something he is not. And the same goes for Elizabeth Bishop's fish, William Cowper's snail, and the hawks of Jeffers and Hughes. These particular creatures remain themselves.

Nor will it do to confuse an extended metaphor with a symbol. In Delmore Schwartz' "The Heavy Bear" the bear is a metaphor for the author's (and everyone's) grosser physical nature. The author explores the sundry follies and embarrassments that he attributes to our insistent physical egoism, but these explicit excursions of the poem do not carry us outside the range of what is stated there. The bear and all his synonymous epithets ("brutish one," "crazy factotum," "inescapable animal") are really terms of an extended poetic conceit:

That inescapable animal walks with me,
...
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly. . ..

This is an essayistic poem. It does not point to something mysterious outside the metaphor, and therefore it is not symbolic. However, the bear in William Faulkner's story of that name is a symbol, because everything in the story points not only to his being tremendous in size, but to his being larger than the bear species itself. The bear is presented as an incarnation of all that is wild and untamable in nature, and that is at the same time inviting the engagement with itself of something similar in man. Herman Melville's whale, Moby Dick, similarly is entitled--and not because of size alone to--the designation of symbol. Metaphors are self-enclosed; symbols point beyond themselves.Explicitness tends to weaken symbolism. Symbolism presents; it does not explain.

"Imagery," then, includes not only direct description, but all the imaginative ways of representing thought in language that we have surveyed in this chapter.