Imagery in poetry.

Imagery in poetry is the poem's link to the senses. In literature, imagery refers to words that trigger your imagination to recall and recombine images—to fuse together old and new memories or mental pictures of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and sensations of touch.

When particular words or descriptions cause you to form mental images, you put together selected memories and apply them to your understanding what you are reading or hearing. (When you go just a step beyond, to write a poem or develop a new way to do a particular task, you are also your using your imagination.) Through the deliberate use of imagery, therefore, poets tap your selected experiences in order to make their works lively and stimulating.

Responses And The Poet's Use Of Detail

In studying imagery, we need to determine how the writer brings the world alive so that we may reconstruct in our imaginations something like the set of pictures and impressions presented in the work. We must read the writer's words, but then let them simmer and percolate in our minds to develop what he or she intended

The connection between title and poem becomes clear if we recall pulleys, because they increase mechanical advantage, may enable large heavily resistant objects to be moved easily by only a small

Imagery, Completeness and Truth

Poets do not create imagery just to present a series of pictures or other sensory impressions. Their aim is to help you see the world in a new way widen your understanding, to transfer their own ideas by the authenticating effects of the vision and perceptions underlying them. Strong, vivid images are thus a means by which literature renders truth. As you read poems and find images in them, try to determine their aptness, consistency, and reliability, for the life of literature generally and poetry specifically is only as durable as the authenticity of their imagery.

Unexpected imagery of such kind, the one that rings true to senses, may be seen in Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My Mistress' Eyes." Here Shakespeare's speaker expressly denies the overly romanticized compliments that men give women, stressing instead that his woman friend lives in the everyday world By this emphasis, Shakespeare gains assent to the view that everyday life is superior to dream life, if for no other reason than that it provides a basis for a relationship between people.

THEME: THE IDEAS AND THE MEANING IN POETRY

Usually the words theme and meaning convey a general sense of ideas, or the specific sense of a major or central idea. In studying poetry the reader has to learn how to take into account all the expressive skills and devices that poets use to make their poems come alive. In this comprehensive sense, theme and meaning refer to the total impact and effect of a poem upon readers, from initial understanding, to interpretation, and finally to comprehension and assimilation.

To determine the total effect of poems, we begin with the basic things. The first of these is subject. Subjects are often general, and may include such broad categories as love, death, war, art, youth, age, work, and nature and the like. It’s quite clear that William Shakespeare’s sonnet of Robert Burn’s poem can share the same subject—love. But the subject of a poem is only the beginning of our comprehension. For subjects alone are static. To move us, poems must take us somewhere. Along with the subject, therefore, we also consider both the primary and secondary ideas in a poem—that is, theme and meaning. We have seen that a poem's theme or main idea is a specific "point" that a poem makes about the subject. In prose, points are made directly and openly. In poetry, however points are made dramatically and indirectly. Indeed, there are some who assert that poetry is self-sufficient, and that it may be read and felt without any major reference to ideas or points. Even if we grant that many poems may have no intention to express ideas (poems are not articles, or sermons), it is nevertheless true that most poems are based in views about their subjects that we may consider as a major aspect of their total meaning.

No matter what the subject, poems achieve much of impact through the strength of their ideas. The ideas are not frivolous expressions of idle poetic moments, but are deeply felt ideas that people should know, think about and apply or not apply, as they wish, to their own lives. The depth of impact and strength of idea are to be found in most good poems and it is this richness and breadth that makes poetry both challenging and effective.

STRATEGIES FOR DEALING WITH MEANING

So that we may comprehend the total meaning of a poem, we consider its ideas together with its intellectual and emotional impact. In effect, meaning involves us in a transfer of experience from the poet’s mind to our own. It is no exaggeration to claim that the structure and development of a poem also produces a corresponding development of thoughts, reactions, considerations, and emotions in readers, meaning, then, is to get at all the ways in which poetry brings these effects about.

We have noted that the theme of a poem is established partly by what the poem says and partly by the way the poem says it. An initial understanding of meaning can be gained by a close, sentence-by sentence reading, but for most poems our initial reading is affected by many of the poet's devices beyond straightforward statement. As often as not the poem's theme is implied as well as stated, and many elements shape the message and meaning. These include speaker, character, setting and action, diction and sound, imagery, metaphor and simile, tone, meter, rhyme, symbol, allusion, and others.

SPEAKER The identity and circumstances of the speaker can significantly affect a poem's meaning. The attitudes and ironies so essential to the meanings of a poem can not be clear if we do not know who the speaker is and what he is doing at the "time" of the poem. Similarly, it is important nine whether a speaker is trustworthy. In short, each poem produces its own unique speaker, whose circumstances have a vital bearing on the content and meaning of the poem.

CHARACTERS, SETTING, ACTION. The characters, settings, and actions in a poem do much to shape the meaning. A poem that is set in a graveyard and that refers to gunnery practice at sea conveys a different meaning from one that tells about a walk through the woodland in spring.

DICTION and SOUND . The words of a poem—denotation, connotation, diction and syntax—all shape the poem's total meaning and emotional impact.

IMAGERY AND RHETORICAL FIGURES. Imagery, metaphor, simile, and other devices of language make abstract ideas and situations concrete and immediate. A poet may use imagery and metaphorical language to reinforce or to negate what appears to the speaker's major thrust.

Clichéd images may produce a negative effect.

TONE. The tone of a poem has a significant effect on theme. Most often, it reinforces a poem's total meaning. Tone may sometimes create ambiguity, however, or it may even work against the stated purpose of the speaker. Irony is one of the forms of the tone.

RHYME, STRUCTURE, AND FORM. Rhyme may be employed to clinch ideas, regulate the tone, and thus shape meaning.

SYMBOL AND ALLUSION. Poets employ symbol and allusion as a kind of shorthand to convey very complex ideas and a great deal of information as quickly and economically as possible. The symbols carry much of the poem's impact and message. Geographic and biblical allusions are crucial in shaping the meaning of a poem.

These seven areas may seem like a large number of variables to consider in working toward an understanding of a poem's central idea and total meaning; at first, the process may seem quite difficult. Keep in mind, that all seven are seldom equally relevant to a given poem. As you study more poetry, you will learn how to focus your attention on two or three significant aspects of a poem and to give others only secondary consideration. Indeed, experienced readers of poetry do much of this step-by-step analysis almost unconsciously and simultaneously as they read a poem.

Let us now turn to a specific poem and see how we might arrive at an understanding of its theme and meaning. The poem, "Ars Poetica," which means "the art of poetry," should help us understand the nature of meaning since it is "about" that very thing.

ARCHIBALD MacLEISH (1892-1982)

1926