A poet, to borrow a phrase that Henry James used to describe fiction writers, is one on whom nothing is lost. Poets take in the world and give us impressions of what they experience through images. An image is language that addresses the senses. The most common images in poetry are visual; they provide verbal pictures of the poets’ encounters — real or imagined — with the world. But poets also create images that appeal to our other senses. Li Ho arouses several senses in this excerpt from “A Beautiful Girl Combs Her Hair”:
Awake at dawn
she’s dreaming
by cool silk curtains
fragrance of spilling hair
half sandalwood, half aloes
windlass creaking at the well
singing jade
These vivid images deftly blend textures, fragrances, and sounds that tease out the sensuousness of the moment. Images give us the physical world to experience in our imaginations. Some poems, like the following one, are written to do just that; they make no comment about what they describe.
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
This poem defies paraphrase because it is all an image of agile movement. No statement is made about the movement; the title, “Poem” — really no title — signals Williams’s refusal to comment on the movements. To impose a meaning on the poem, we’d probably have to knock over the flowerpot.
We experience the image in Williams’s “Poem” more clearly because of how the sentence is organized into lines and groups of lines, or stanzas. Consider how differently the sentence is read if it is arranged as prose:
As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset, first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot.
The poem’s line and stanza division transforms what is essentially an awkward prose sentence into a rhythmic verbal picture. Especially when the poem is read aloud, this line and stanza division allows us to feel the image we see. Even the lack of a period at the end suggests that the cat is only pausing.
Images frequently do more than offer only sensory impressions, however. They also convey emotions and moods, as in the following poem’s view of Civil War troops moving across a river.
A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun — hark to the
musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person, a picture, the
negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford — while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gaily in the wind.
Whitman seems to capture momentarily all of the troop’s actions, and through carefully chosen, suggestive details — really very few — he succeeds in making “each group, each person, a picture.” Specific details, even when few are provided, give us the impression that we see the entire picture; it is as if those are the details we would remember if we had viewed the scene ourselves. Notice, too, that the movement of the “line in long array” is emphasized by the continuous winding syntax of the poem’s lengthy lines.
Movement is also central to the next poem, in which action and motion are created through carefully chosen verbs.
It rides upon the wrinkled hide
of water, like the upturned hull
of a small canoe or kayak
waiting to be righted — yet its law
is opposite to that of boats,
it floats upon its breastbone and
brings whatever spine there is to light.
A thin shaft is slotted into place.
Then a puffed right-angle of wind
pushes it forward, out into the bay,
where suddenly it glitters into speed,
tilts, knifes up, and for the moment’s
nothing but a slim projectile
of cambered fiberglass,
peeling the crests.
The man’s
clamped to the mast, taut as a guywire.
Part of the sleek apparatus
he controls, immaculate nerve
of balance, plunge and curvet,
he clinches all component movements
into single motion.
It bucks, stalls, shudders, yaws, and dips
its hissing sides beneath the surface
that sustains it, tensing
into muscle that nude ellipse
of lunging appetite and power.
And now the mechanism’s wholly
dolphin, springing toward its prey
of spume and beaded sunlight,
tossing spray, and hits the vertex
of the wide, salt glare of distance,
and reverses.
Back it comes through
a screen of particles,
scalloped out of water, shimmer
and reflection, the wind snapping
and lashing it homeward,
shearing the curve of the wave,
breaking the spell of the caught breath
and articulate play of sinew, to enter
the haven of the breakwater
and settle in a rush of silence.
Now the crossing drifts
in the husk of its wake
and nothing’s the same again
as, gliding elegantly on a film of water,
the man guides
his brash, obedient legend
into shore.
“Windsurfing” is awash with images of speed, fluidity, and power. Even the calming aftermath of the breakwater is described as a “rush of silence,” adding to the sense of motion that is detailed and expanded throughout the poem.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery1; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles2 of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.