Images, Symbols, and Their Friends
WE’VE PUT THIS OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE, AND THERE’S NO WAY around it. When people say they don’t like poetry, this is almost certainly the part they mean. It makes your head hurt. It gives me a pain in the neck. There’s a near-universal response that can be written as a proof:
Let’s fix that.
If you’re like the rest of us, you’ve lumped a bunch of things together under one heading, and the scary one at that. What we really mean is a whole group of things—yes, symbol, but also image, metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, trope, personification—that come under the heading of figurative language. For purposes of our discussion, let’s think of all those things as variations of word-pictures. That, by the way, is another, very old form of figurative language, a kenning, or the Anglo-Saxon word form that is made by jamming two nouns together with some violence.
The first and most straightforward word-picture is the image, which at its most basic is simply, as English poet C. Day Lewis wrote in The Poetic Image (1947), “a picture made out of words.” Oh, like we couldn’t figure that out on our own, right? One thing used to create another, simple substitution. Think of our pal Shakespeare describing the aging man as a tree in autumn-turning-winter, “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.” Now that’s a picture in words. That’s its first task. A bigger job is for that word-picture to act as the vehicle for metaphors or similes. When Homer, for instance, compares the onslaught of the Greek hero Diomedes to a river in spate (unstoppable heavy flooding), that river is an image, a picture in words, usually many words, that acts as the vehicle (the thing that carries the load).
How about if, instead of speaking of symbols and metaphors and so on, let’s start with the concept that lies at the base of figuration: deflection of meaning. First, the big caveat: things in literature are, first of all, their literal selves. A frog is a frog. This is what Pound means when he says that a poem needs to work on the level of the person “for whom a hawk is simply a hawk.” So let’s remember always to acknowledge first of all that the tulip is indeed a tulip before we go running off to assert that it’s really a fairy. Having established its tulipness, however, we can begin to investigate whether it is carrying some secondary meaning.
In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, for instance, we need to see that tree in late autumn with only a few or maybe no leaves (lovely of him to give us options for how we envision that tree). That is our primary image. Even before the image has been presented, however, its meaning is deflected toward something else. He hasn’t simply presented a tree or a time of year, but a time of year reflected in a man’s time of life, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold.” The most obvious sort of deflection is the simile, which holds up a large sign shouting “Comparison ahead” by using “like” or “as.” Homer’s flooded river is introduced as a comparison to the hero’s onslaught, “since he went storming up the plain like a winter-swollen river in spate.” Telegraphing this comparison was extremely useful to the listeners of the poem, since they had a tremendous volume of material to digest of an evening, during which many of them would be sliding further from sobriety. Best to make clear that the swollen river you’re about to introduce is used for illustrative purposes and is not some new topic being injected. The middle of an epic recitation is no place for subtlety. The simile is not restricted to the epic arena, however. Robert Burns says in a famous poem, “My Luve’s like a red, red rose,” leaving readers in no doubt as to the comparison. Even with the change from oral to written verse, the nature of the simile remains straightforward.
That other notable comparison, metaphor, is by contrast subtlety itself. Here, the vehicle and the tenor, the thing to which the vehicle is being compared (and don’t blame me: I. A. Richards came up with the term long before I was born). So what is a metaphor? Let’s say it’s a simile that lost its “like,” which is sort of true. Metaphors lack the overt declaration that a comparison is taking place, which is what the “like” or “as” represents. That declaration is not really needed. Most of the time when we hear a metaphor, we don’t even notice, as when we might read, “He was cut down in the bloom of youth.” Do you stop and think about the comparison to a flower? Of course not.
Metaphors worm their way into our consciousness (see, there’s one now) so that their first, overt meaning gets lost. If we consider Sonnet 73, there are actually three metaphors at work, one in each quatrain. The first, as we just mentioned, is the tree in autumn. The second is the coming of night, “In me thou see’st the twilight of such day . . . Which by and by black night doth take away.” The final one involves a dying fire, “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth does lie.” These comparisons all march to the same beat, namely that time has had its way with the speaker and now his time is almost gone. Metaphors can occur singly, of course, but here Shakespeare wants the emphasis he achieves by stacking them. In other words, writers are free to use them as (in)frequently as they wish, and good ones will always possess power.
Neither simile nor metaphor, we should note, need be momentary invaders. Whole poems can be and often are built around them. Lord Byron does just that in “She Walks in Beauty” (1813):
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Byron sets up his simile in the first two lines with the comparison to “cloudless climes and starry nights.” From there, he returns repeatedly to the theme of light and dark. The best of dark and light, he tells us, meet in her face and eyes, but mellowed to “that tender light” imparted by twilight or lighted night that is washed out in the brightness of “gaudy day.” The second stanza is taken up with how the interplay is perfectly balanced: one shade the more, one ray the less—that is, the tiniest tilt toward more darkness—would have “half impaired” that perfect balance (“nameless grace”) between her black hair (“every raven tress”) and her fair complexion (“or softly lightens o’er her face”). That sense of balance persists into the final stanza even as it recedes into the background, replaced by his extolling of her inner beauty. In the first line he mentions the (fair) cheek and (dark) brow, while in the third he gives us “The smiles that win, the tints that glow,” leading him to the conclusion that her days are spent in goodness, that her mind is at peace, her heart innocent.
Whatever qualms we may have about Byron’s aesthetic-moral equating of outward beauty with spiritual purity, we can have no doubt of his sincerity that this woman he has seen (by most accounts, his beautiful cousin-by-marriage whom he saw in a black dress with spangles) overwhelmed his senses. Happily, the vision did not strike him wordless; by the next morning, he tells us, the poem was written.
Compare this to Frost’s sonnet “Acquainted with the Night,” which we looked at in the chapter on rhyme. The speaker tells us that he met the darkness full on, experiencing its silences and its noises, its murk and rain, its furtive travelers, and the one point of light, that “luminary clock,” that declared the time “neither wrong nor right.” Until that statement, the poem seems merely to be about an inveterate nightwalker, but the introduction of right and wrong suggests something else, that perhaps the darkness he has encountered is as much spiritual as physical. Whether one accepts this reading or not, what impresses is that the sonnet never loses sight of its main idea of the speaker who has experienced the dark side.
What these two poems show us, beyond the fact that poetry, even at one or two hundred years old, can be entirely accessible, is how to take a simple idea and wring every bit of meaning from it. Both the thoroughgoing darkness of Frost’s poem and the play of dark and light in Byron’s exert a grip on their respective poems that never slackens. Rather, they animate and control the release of information. This technique of employing an extended metaphor as the overriding device for the entire poem is called a conceit. That term is usually defined to mean an extended metaphor, but we can apply it as well to Byron’s simile; it’s just that similes generally are less tenacious about hanging around. John Donne is responsible for two of the most famous poetic conceits. In “The Flea,” the speaker tells his beloved that, since the flea has bitten each of them, thereby commingling their blood, they are already as good as married and should therefore consummate their relationship without delay. This is a prime instance of a carpe diem—literally, “seize the day”—poem, the end goal of which is almost invariably the bedding of the implied listener to the speaker’s argument. His other conceit is the compass (geometric, not geographical), which he uses in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1613) to promise his beloved as he leaves on a trip that, no matter how far he seems to range away from her, she is always the fixed foot of a compass to which he is merely the movable arm, seemingly free but always connected to that fixed point that is the beloved.
THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT LOVE THAT SEEMS TO CALL OUT FOR this sort of extended metaphor. At one time, of course, the reason was the difficulty in writing directly about the act of love, although Edna St. Vincent Millay dispenses with any coyness in her Sonnet 42:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Well, then. Not much question what this one’s about. That frankness, especially from a woman, created firestorms about her work. But that’s not our interest here. Okay, maybe just a little. What really matters is the past, remembered and unremembered. In the octave, the speaker fails to recall the roll of former lovers. She can’t remember those she has kissed or with whom she has slept the night through; they have become ghosts tapping in vain at the window to be admitted. She only knows that they won’t come again.
If the poem were eight lines long, we might conclude that it is mildly shocking (when first published in 1920) or titillating (now). But when it makes its turn for home in the sestet, we see that something greater than naughtiness has been going on. Millay goes all Shakespeare on us with her tree in winter and the vanished birds and silent boughs and lost summer that “in me sings no more.” She was thirty-one years old. That’s why we do well to think of the speaker of the poem as a fictive presence. As a side note, if she were speaking in her own person, she likely would have changed her young men to men and women, being rather catholic in her tastes. What matters for us here, though, is the way that the wintry scene of the sestet alters and amplifies the metaphor of the octave. These are not mere forgotten lovers but figures of a departed youth. This is an instance of a conceit that deepens and expands, as many of the great ones do, as it moves through the poem. Not bad, when it has only fourteen lines through which to move.
HAVING FORESTALLED THIS PART FOR SO LONG, WE NOW MUST GIVE in and talk about it. I have one thing to say: yes. Yes, that is one you just asked about. Yes, so is that. After all, why did you ask? Because you were pretty sure. And yes, you do too know what it means. Symbols. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Although Lord knows plenty of folks would like to try.
Similes and metaphors are pretty straightforward substitution of one thing for another. My love is like a red, red rose. Not much wiggle room there: love = rose. Aging person = tree in late autumn. In each case, one element is carrying the weight for another (that vehicle-tenor thing). With symbols, no such luck.
At bottom, a symbol is an object or action or phrase that stands for something beyond itself. That can be an idea, a state of being, a spiritual condition, whatever. So far, so good. Except that that “something” isn’t one and only one “thing.” If a deflective-meaning equation is a one-for-one substitution, we call that allegory, not symbolism. When we see the green light on Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, we know it stands for something, but what that something is may be in doubt. Every reader will come up with a meaning that probably won’t match what it means for Nick Carraway, much less for Gatsby himself. That light contains a host of possibilities, many of which are not mutually exclusive: we may sense that it holds several meanings for us all at once. And we can do this with any famous literary symbol, from Melville’s white whale to Huck’s raft to Harry Potter’s scar to Frodo’s ring. Nothing to be frightened of.
YOU WANT SYMBOLS IN YOUR POETRY? TRY THESE: A FIELD OF HAY being mowed by a scythe, a woods on a snowy night, a rock wall being rebuilt by two neighbors, an abandoned woodpile on the edge of a swamp, bent-over birch trees, a forking path in a forest. And those are the product of a single poet, as you probably recognize. Frost draws them from the natural world, or the natural world reshaped by humans, if you prefer, but in every case they raise more questions about humans than about nature. Nor do they provide simple answers: each of those symbols points beyond its specific identity toward some more universal condition and hints at a small constellation of possible meanings. Do the birches suggest wistfulness at the memory of youth? The desire to explore the next world without leaving this one (which the speaker makes explicit when he says he would like to climb on “toward” heaven but be set back gently on earth rather than achieve his target)? The inability of vegetative or human objects to withstand the greater forces of nature? Some combination? Other meanings entirely?
Here’s the maddening part: the choice is yours. Oh, you’re limited by your own life and reading experiences, at least to a slight degree. I have found that my own readings change over decades as my own circumstances alter. And the text rules out some meanings. The bent-over birches are not telling us, “The Martians are already here” or “Save the Whales”; there is simply no support in the text for Martian whales. But even when we rule out all the deranged possibilities, there is still a fairly broad range remaining to us.
I remember in secondary school sensing the entire class freeze when the teacher asked, “What does that mean?” We knew that there was an answer, the answer in the teacher’s edition, and guessing wrong would make us look stupid. Now, we didn’t really know if that sort of answer was there or not, but we knew, you know? My guess is that the teachers knew that there were always multiple good choices. And that the ridicule came not from that side of the big desk but from ours. In any case, these days we trust readers more to make good choices, to develop readings that make sense for them while respecting the text, to ask good questions of the text—and the instructor, when necessary—so that their readings are informed, interesting, wise. Own your reading. It won’t be quite like anyone else’s, but that’s okay. In fact, more than okay.