[Andrew Frisardi]

For all the poetry out there, a lot of poems, even pretty good ones, don’t have striking imagery. There might be interesting details, accurate observations, and whatnot, but a lot of images in poems seem gratuitous, not hitting on anything essential about the subject--only contingencies.

Gaston Bachelard wrote, “One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.”

When an image really does stand out in a poem it can be more memorable than the language itself. What makes an image memorable? How does imagery in poetry work, compared to its use in other media (movies, photographs, etc.)?

Here’s an image from Dante that always amazes me. A lot of his imagery does that, but I choose this one because it’s peripheral to his narrative, almost in passing. It’s from the 26th canto of Purgatorio, where Dante, Virgil, and Statius are passing by the flames inside which the lustful are being purified. It’s afternoon. The sun is shining down from Dante’s right at about shoulder level. And the flames are to his left. Instead of saying, “I cast a shadow on the flames, and the shades inside the fire took note of that,” he says:

Io facea con l’ombra più rovente
parer la fiamma; e pur a tanto indizio
vidi molt’ombre, andando, poner mente.

(With my shadow I was making the flame seem an intenser red, and even though the trace was so slight, I saw many shades passing along turning their attention to it.)

It’s such a plain but subtle observation. We’ve all seen flames that are transparent in the sunlight but that darken when a shadow falls on them. For me as reader, it’s that sudden recognition that makes the image so effective. The second part of the terzina makes us think about the same image seen from inside the fire, which is why Dante included the image to begin with: the shades in the fire are amazed because someone in Purgatory is throwing a shadow--he still has a physical body.

All of this is done with rapid decisive strokes, direct and simple.

A film could have the same imagery, but for me this scene is all the more memorable because it is presented in words. In part this is because language slows down the experience of seeing what the artist sees. And in part because the meter and rhyme and choice of words (including the wordplay between Dante’s “shadow” and the “shades” of the dead) impresses the image on my imagination. I participate in it more—as reader, I am creating the image as I read, the language gives me the cues.

Thoughts on this? Memorable images, anyone?

[Stuart Farley]

Andrew,

What an excellent topic for a discussion! I have to say that this is something which I am keenly interested in, not least of all because I'm a film student.

I think that you right in drawing a distinction between a poetic image and a photographic (or cinematic) image. The poetic image is by its very nature selective and discriminatory, presenting only details or aspects or moments of the object. Photography and cinema, on the other hand, will always situate the image against its surroundings - even in a close-up. If a poet were to create an image of a hand, he can isolate certain details, or even make use of imaginative description and simile, which doesn't really have an equivalent in film/photography.

Consider Rimbaud's Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie, where he writes:

Jeanne-Marie has strong hands,
Dark hands which summer tanned

and:

-- These hands have sold no oranges,
Nor darkened at the feet of gods;
These hands have washed no rags
Of heavy eyeless children.

These poetic images would be nearly impossible to replicate in photography or cinema with the concision and simplicity of the poem. The second stanza quoted presents another oddity: the image of Jeanne-Marie's hands is defined by an absence, and a compression of time and space. If photography is an image of an instance in time, and cinema is an image subject to a particular duration of time, then the poetic image is free to traverse time - indeed, it can even compress it. Rimbaud presents the reader with an image of hands which have never sold oranges, which suggests that a lifetime of experience - or lack of experience - is captured in this image. Simply photographing this pair of hands would not impart the same information.

Essentially the cinema and photography has more in common with our perception, whereas poetry has more in common with our thought and imagination. In a way, poetry deals more with mental images (memories, dreams), which can take place in the past, present or future with relative ease, whereas photographic and cinematic images are always a perpetual present.

As for memorable images, many of the poems in Rimbaud's Illuminations are composed almost entirely of images. Andrew, when you write that "a lot of images in poems seem gratuitous, not hitting on anything essential about the subject" it seems that you are suggesting that images need to be supplementary to the "point" of the poem. On this issue I will have to disagree; the Illuminations represent, for me, a real pinnacle of poetic art. Some of these poems are so saturated with imagery that there really is no point as such, other than the images themselves. The real achievement that this presents is the freedom of interpretation and possibility for participation, which, as you point out, allows the reader to create the images for themselves.

As an example of this, consider Rimbaud's Enfance II, essentially a series of descriptive and imaginative images:

It is she, the little girl, dead behind the rosebushes. - The young mamma, deceased, comes down the stoop. - The cousin's carriage creaks on the sand. - The little brother (he is in India!) there, before the western sky in the meadow of pinks. The old men who have been buried upright in the rampart overgrown with gillyflowers.

Swarms of golden leaves surround the general's house. They are in the south. - You follow the red road to reach the empty inn. The chateau is for sale; the shutters are coming off. The priest must have taken away the key of the church. Around the park the keepers' cottages are uninhabited. The enclosures are so high that nothing can be seen but the rustling tree tops. Besides, there is nothing to be seen within.

The meadows go up to the hamlets without anvils or cocks. The sluice gate is open. O the Calvaries and the windmills of the desert, the islands and the haystacks!

Magic flowers droned. The slopes cradled him. Beasts of a fabulous elegance moved about. The clouds gathered over the high sea, formed of an eternity of hot tears.

Stuart

[Andrew Frisardi]

Stuart, thanks! I'm fascinated by what you say about poetry and film.

About

when you write that "a lot of images in poems seem gratuitous, not hitting on anything essential about the subject" it seems that you are suggesting that images need to be supplementary to the "point" of the poem,

I'm sorry I didn't explain myself well. That is the last thing that I think. I just meant that a lot of images in poems are superficial, no depth to them, they don't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up like Emily Dickinson said a poem should. Rimbaud's poetry sure meets that criterion, so I couldn't agree more that with Rimbaud, we're in rich rich territory, imagery galore--the real thing.

[Gregory Dowling]

Of course around the beginning of the 20th century they did try to write poems that consisted only of images - or in certain cases only of a single image. However, as someone once pointed out (and I can't remember who), it is curious that a whole poetic movement is now remembered for just one poem. Yes, the one with the petal and the black bough - that one.

So, yes, we all remember it. But perhaps a bit of a dead end in itself. What I'm trying to say is just that poetry cannot be only images. The image of the flame and shadow in the Dante passage, as Andrew brings out, has resonance because of the context, because of what it tells us about Dante in Purgatory.

These memorable images from Hecht's "Venetian Vespers" tell us a great deal about the narrator's state of mind:

Here in the haywire weeds, concealed by wilds
Of goldenrod and toadflax, lies a spur
With its one boxcar of brick-colored armor,
At noon, midsummer, fiercer than a kiln,
Rippling the thinness of the air around it
With visible distortions. Among the stones
Of the railbed, fragments of shattered amber
That held a pint of rye. The carapace
Of a dried beetle. A broken orange crate
Streaked with tobacco stains at the nailheads
In the gray, fractured slats. And over all
The dust of oblivion finer than milled flour
Where chips of brick, clinkers and old iron
burn in their slow, invisible decay.

(An echo of Frost in the last line.)

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, Andrew, for starting this thread and Stuart for adding your thoughts.

Imagery is an aspect of poetry that esp. interests me, and the Hecht text Greg quoted made me almost lose heart. So beautiful, and I know I will never achieve anything remotely close to it, but oh, what a poem.

I am ashamed to confess that I have none of Heicht's collections, but that will soon be remedied. (So thanks for that too.)

While Pound's faces in the subway is likely the poem most people associate with the Imagists, for me the most outstanding poem of that movement, the poem that hit me like a freight train when first I read it years ago and which never loses the power to move me, is Hulme's Autumn.

I am sure everyone knows it, but on the odd chance that some younguns drop by to read, I am putting it up here.

Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

It is less complex than the Hecht poem, and more easily memorized. But I would not compare their respective merits, they work on different mental levels.

I think these lines by Gjertrud Schnackenberg are outstanding (from Summer Evening)

Here little moves, but, like a swan, the moon
Riffles the surface, trails night in its wake.

For me, those lines engender a transcendental response; the poem, as words, disappears entirely, and I experience only a mental image.

I think the keyword is immediacy, the image should enter the brain with no intellectual translation necessary. It should hit the reader as Hulme's poem hit me: like a freight train.

[Mark Allinson]

A fascinating topic, Andrew.

The image has long been problematic in the West. As Hillman says:

“The degradation of the image in monotheistic Hebrewism and of phantasia in Helenic philosophy, reappear in the Protestant Reformation, which are only two particularly forceful expressions of an image-phobia in Western theological and philosophical writing”. Re-Visioning Psychology, p 11.

All the "spiritual" religions have issues with images - such as the Protestant revolt from image-rich Catholicism, and Islam's anxiety over images.

Why? Because the image goes straight to the brain's emotional centres, bypassing the scrutiny of reason. Its action cannot easily be censored by conscious thought. Thus its power.

Also, the image involves the senses and imagination - historically two highly suspicious realms.

We sometimes forget that a poetic image is not restricted to the visual. Images may be formed from any of the senses - olfactory images, auditory images, tactile images, gustatory images, etc.

Here is another insight into the image from Hillman:

“Not images represent feelings, but feelings are inherent to images”. Archetypal Psychology, p 48.

This suggests that selection of the right image will convey to the reader its inherent emotion.

[Janet Kenny]

Surely it has always been a triumph of economy and accuracy that has distinguished all great art, including poetry? That is perforce, imagery— sensation, emotion, visual, aural or transcendental.

The aim being to achieve most with the least.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I think that Pound thought of Imagism as a temporary phase of experimentation—he dropped the whole thing pretty fast, which is why he poked fun later at Amy Lowell, calling the movement “Amygism.” Pound got the “petals on a wet, black bough” idea from his work on Chinese poetry with the scholar Fenellosa. If I’m remembering right, what Pound noticed in Chinese was that the language itself was more concrete, more saturated with images, less prone to abstraction than Western languages.

He dropped Imagism after a year or two, but used it even later, as in the last line of canto 17:

Sunset like the grasshopper flying.

He’s referring here to a green tint in the sky before sunset.

Pound’s approach was often to give the image in this sudden way, through a leap of association, which is quite different from the Hecht’s approach in that passage, which is cumulative and linear.

Mark, I think the subject of images and religion is more complicated than that, but I agree about the iconoclasm of Protestantism and some of Islam. I’d say that when spirituality tends toward fundamentalism, images go out the (stained glass) window.

The mention of other kinds of imagery besides visual imagery brought to mind synesthesia in poetry. I don’t have a passage on hand, but Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” stands out in my memory as a poem that uses synesthesia effectively. Dante uses it too, as in this line from the Inferno:

mi ripigneva là dove ‘l sol tace.

it drove me back to where the sun is silent.

That's so much better than saying, "it drove me back to where the sun was hidden." It creates a mystery and a precise image at the same time.

[Gail White]

In another instance of recognition in Purgatory, the blind souls of the envious realize that Dante is alive because they hear him breathing.

[wendy v]

Neat discussion. I think some people 'think' primarily in image, which might be in itself a kind of synesthesia.

Here's the Baudelaire that was mentioned above


Correspondences

In Nature's temple, living pillars rise,
Speaking sometimes in words of abstruse sense;
Man walks through woods of symbols, dark and dense,
Which gaze at him with fond familiar eyes.
Like distant echoes blent in the beyond
In unity, in a deep darksome way,
Vast as black night and vast as splendent day,
Perfumes and sounds and colors correspond.

Some scents are cool as children's flesh is cool,
Sweet as are oboes, green as meadowlands,
And others rich, corrupt, triumphant, full,
Expanding as infinity expands:
Benzoin or musk or amber that incenses,
Hymning the ecstasy of soul and senses.


— tr, Jacques LeClercq