17

Imagery

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

—EZRA POUND

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)*

In a Station of the Metro 1916

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound said he wrote this poem to convey an experience: emerging one day from a train in the Paris subway

(Métro), he beheld “suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another.” Originally he had described his

impression in a poem thirty lines long. In this final version, each line contains an image, which, like a picture,

may take the place of a thousand words.

Though the term image suggests a thing seen, when speaking of images in poetry, we generally mean a word

or sequence of words that refers to any sensory experience. Often this experience is a sight (visual imagery, as in

Pound’s poem), but it may be a sound (auditory imagery) or a touch (tactile imagery, as a perception of

roughness or smoothness). It may be an odor or a taste or perhaps a bodily sensation such as pain, the prickling of

gooseflesh, the quenching of thirst, or—as in the following brief poem—the perception of something cold.

Taniguchi Buson (1716–1783)*

The piercing chill I feel (about 1760)

The piercing chill I feel:

  my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom,

    under my heel . . .

—Translated by Harold G. Henderson

As in this haiku (in Japanese, a poem of seventeen syllables) an image can convey a flash of understanding.

Had he wished, the poet might have spoken of the dead woman, of the contrast between her death and his memory

of her, of his feelings toward death in general. But such a discussion would be quite different from the poem he

actually wrote. Striking his bare foot against the comb, now cold and motionless but associated with the living

wife (perhaps worn in her hair), the widower feels a shock as if he had touched the woman’s corpse. A literal,

physical sense of death is conveyed; the abstraction “death” is understood through the senses. To render the

abstract in concrete terms is what poets often try to do; in this attempt, an image can be valuable.

An image may occur in a single word, a phrase, a sentence, or, as in this case, an entire short poem. To speak

of the imagery of a poem—all its images taken together—is often more useful than to speak of separate images.

To divide Buson’s haiku into five images—chill, wife, comb, bedroom, heel—is possible, for any noun that refers

to a visible object or a sensation is an image, but this is to draw distinctions that in themselves mean little and to

disassemble a single experience.

Does an image cause a reader to experience a sense impression? Not quite. Reading the word petals, no one

literally sees petals; but the occasion is given for imagining them. The image asks to be seen with the mind’s eye.

And although “In a Station of the Metro” records what Ezra Pound saw, it is of course not necessary for a poet

actually to have lived through a sensory experience in order to write of it. Keats may never have seen a newly

discovered planet through a telescope, despite the image in his sonnet on Chapman’s Homer.

It is tempting to think of imagery as mere decoration, particularly when we read Keats, who fills his poems

with an abundance of sights, sounds, odors, and tastes. But a successful image is not just a dab of paint or a flashy

bauble. When Keats opens “The Eve of St. Agnes” with what have been called the coldest lines in literature, he

evokes by a series of images a setting and a mood:

St. Agnes’ eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told

His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death . . .

Indeed, some literary critics look for much of the meaning of a poem in its imagery, wherein they expect to

see the mind of the poet more truly revealed than in whatever the poet explicitly claims to believe. Though

Shakespeare’s Theseus (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) accuses poets of being concerned with “airy nothings,”

poets are usually very much concerned with what is in front of them. This concern is of use to us. Perhaps, as Alan

Watts has remarked, Americans are not the materialists they are sometimes accused of being. How could anyone

taking a look at an American city think that its inhabitants deeply cherish material things? Involved in our

personal hopes and apprehensions, anticipating the future so hard that much of the time we see the present through

a film of thought across our eyes, perhaps we need a poet occasionally to remind us that even the coffee we

absentmindedly sip comes in (as Yeats put it) a “heavy spillable cup.”

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)*

The winter evening settles down 1917

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

5

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

10

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

QUESTIONS

1. What mood is evoked by the images in Eliot’s poem?

2. What kind of city neighborhood has the poet chosen to describe? How can you tell?

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)*

Root Cellar 1948

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped,

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

5

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks!—

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

10

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

QUESTIONS

1. As a boy growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, Theodore Roethke spent much of his time in a large commercial

greenhouse run by his family. What details in his poem show more than a passing acquaintance with growing

things?

2. What varieties of image does “Root Cellar” contain? Point out examples.

3. What do you understand to be Roethke’s attitude toward the root cellar? Does he view it as a disgusting

chamber of horrors? Pay special attention to the last two lines.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)*

The Fish 1946

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

5

He didn’t fight.

He hadn’t fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

and homely. Here and there

10

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wall-paper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wall-paper:

shapes like full-blown roses

15

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

20

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

—the frightening gills,

25

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly—

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

30

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

35

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

40

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

—It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

45

I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

—if you could call it a lip—

50

grim, wet, and weapon-like,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

55

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

60

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

65

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

70

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

75

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

QUESTIONS

1. How many abstract words does this poem contain? What proportion of the poem is imagery?

2. What is the speaker’s attitude toward the fish? Comment in particular on lines 61–64.

3. What attitude do the images of the rainbow of oil (line 69), the orange bailer (bailing bucket, line 71), the

sun-cracked thwarts (line 72) convey? Does the poet expect us to feel mournful because the boat is in such

sorry condition?

4. What is meant by rainbow, rainbow, rainbow?

5. How do these images prepare us for the conclusion? Why does the speaker let the fish go?

Anne Stevenson (b. 1933)*

The Victory 1974

I thought you were my victory

though you cut me like a knife

when I brought you out of my body

into your life.

5

Tiny antagonist, gory,

blue as a bruise. The stains

of your cloud of glory

bled from my veins.

How can you dare, blind thing,

10

blank insect eyes?

You barb the air. You sting

with bladed cries.

Snail! Scary knot of desires!

Hungry snarl! Small son.

15

Why do I have to love you?

How have you won?

QUESTIONS

1. Newborn babies are often described as “little angels” or “bundles of joy.” How does the speaker of “The

Victory” describe her son?

2. Why does the speaker describe the child as an “antagonist” (line 5)?

3. Why is the poem titled “The Victory”?

4. Why is the infant compared to a knife in both lines 2 and 12?

Charles Simic (b. 1938)*

Fork 1969

This strange thing must have crept

Right out of hell.

It resembles a bird’s foot

Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

5

As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:

Its head which like your fist

Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

QUESTIONS

1. The title image of this poem is an ordinary and everyday object. What happens to it in the first two lines?

2. How does the word crept in line 1 change our sense of the fork? How does the author develop this new sense

later in the poem?

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)*

A Route of Evanescence (1879)

A Route of Evanescence

With a revolving Wheel –

A Resonance of Emerald –

A Rush of Cochineal° –

red dye

5

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts its tumbled Head –

The mail from Tunis, probably,

An easy Morning’s Ride –

A ROUTE OF EVANESCENCE. Dickinson titled this poem “A Humming-bird” in an 1880 letter to a friend. 1

Evanescence; ornithologist’s term for the luminous sheen of certain birds’ feathers. 7 Tunis: capital city of

Tunisia, North Africa.

QUESTIONS

What is the subject of this poem? How can you tell?

Jean Toomer (1894–1967)

Reapers 1923

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

5

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,

His belly close to ground. I see the blade,

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

QUESTIONS

1. Imagine the scene Jean Toomer describes. Which particulars most vividly strike the mind’s eye?

2. What kind of image is silent swinging?

3. Read the poem aloud. Notice especially the effect of the words sound of steel on stones and field rat, startled,

squealing bleeds. What interesting sounds are present in the very words that contain these images?

4. What feelings do you get from this poem as a whole? Would you agree with someone who said, “This poem

gives us a sense of happy, carefree life down on the farm, close to nature”? Exactly what in “Reapers” makes

you feel the way you do? Besides appealing to our auditory and visual imagination, what do the images

contribute?

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)*

Pied Beauty (1877)

Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-color as a brinded° cow;

streaked

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

5

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plow;

    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.°

equipment

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

10

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                   Praise him.

QUESTIONS

1. What does the word pied mean? (Hint: what does a Pied Piper look like?)

2. According to Hopkins, what do skies, cow, trout, ripe chestnuts, finches’ wings, and landscapes all have in

common? What landscapes can the poet have in mind? (Have you ever seen any dappled landscape while

looking down from an airplane, or from a mountain or high hill?)

3. What do you make of line 6: what can carpenters’ saws and ditch-diggers’ spades possibly have in common

with the dappled things in lines 2–4?

4. Does Hopkins refer only to contrasts that meet the eye? What other kinds of variation interest him?

5. Try to state in your own words the theme of this poem. How essential to our understanding of this theme are

Hopkins’s images?

About Haiku

Arakida Moritake (1473–1549)

The falling flower

The falling flower

I saw drift back to the branch

Was a butterfly.

—Translated by Babette Deutsch

Haiku means “beginning-verse” in Japanese—perhaps because the form may have originated in a game.

Players, given a haiku, were supposed to extend its three lines into a longer poem. Haiku (the word can also be

plural) consist mainly of imagery, but as we saw in Buson’s lines about the cold comb, their imagery is not always

only pictorial; it can also involve any of the five senses. Haiku are so short that they depend on imagery to trigger

associations and responses in the reader. A haiku in Japanese is rimeless; its seventeen syllables are traditionally

arranged in three lines, usually following a pattern of five, seven, and five syllables. English haiku frequently

ignore such a pattern, being rimed or unrimed as the poet prefers. What English haiku do try to preserve is the

powerful way Japanese haiku capture the intensity of a particular moment, usually by linking two concrete

images. There is little room for abstract thoughts or general observations. The following attempt, though

containing seventeen syllables, is far from haiku in spirit:

Now that our love is gone

I feel within my soul

a nagging distress.

Unlike the author of those lines, haiku poets look out upon a literal world, seldom looking inward to discuss their

feelings. Japanese haiku tend to be seasonal in subject, but because they are so highly compressed, they usually

just imply a season: a blossom indicates spring; a crow on a branch, autumn; snow, winter. Not just pretty little

sketches of nature (as some Westerners think), haiku assume a view of the universe in which observer and nature

are not separated.

Haiku emerged in sixteenth-century Japan and soon developed into a deeply esteemed form. Even today,

Japanese soldiers, stockbrokers, scientists, schoolchildren, and even the emperor still find occasion to pen haiku.

Soon after the form first captured the attention of Western poets at the end of the nineteenth century, it became

immensely influential for modern poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H. D., as a model for

the kind of verse they wanted to write—concise, direct, and imagistic.

The Japanese consider the poems of the “Three Masters”—Basho, Buson, and Issa—to be the pinnacle of the

classical haiku. Each poet had his own personality: Basho, the ascetic seeker of Zen enlightenment; Buson, the

worldly artist; Issa, the sensitive master of wit and pathos. Here are free translations of poems from each of the

“Three Masters.”

Matsuo Basho (1644–1694)*

Heat-lightning streak In the old stone pool

Heat-lightning streak— In the old stone pool

through darkness pierces a frogjump:

the heron’s shriek. splishhhhh.

—Translated by X. J. Kennedy —Translated by X. J. Kennedy

Taniguchi Buson (1716–1783)*

On the one-ton temple bell I go

On the one-ton temple bell I go,

a moonmoth, folded into sleep, you stay;

sits still. two autumns.

—Translated by X. J. Kennedy —Translated by Robert Hass

Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827)*

only one guy Cricket

only one guy and Cricket, be

only one fly trying to careful! I’m rolling

make the guest room do. over!

—Translated by Cid Corman —Translated by Robert Bly

I. Haiku from Japanese Internment Camps

Japanese immigrants brought the tradition of haiku-writing to the United States, often forming local clubs to

pursue their shared literary interests. During World War II, when Japanese Americans were unjustly considered

“enemy aliens” and confined to federal internment camps, these poets continued to write in their bleak new

surroundings. Today these haiku provide a vivid picture of the deprivations suffered by the poets, their families,

and their fellow internees.

Suiko Matsushita

Rain shower from mountain

Rain shower from mountain

quietly soaking

barbed wire fence

—Translated by Violet Kazue de Cristoro

Neiji Ozawa

War forced us from California

War forced us from California

No ripples this day

on desert lake

—Translated by Violet Kazue de Cristoro

Hakuro Wada

Even the croaking of frogs

Even the croaking of frogs

comes from outside the barbed wire fence

this is our life

—Translated by Violet Kazue de Cristoro

Contemporary Haiku

If you care to try your hand at haiku-writing, here are a few suggestions: make every word matter. Include few

adjectives, shun needless conjunctions. Set your poem in the present. (“Haiku,” said Basho, “is simply what is

happening in this place at this moment.”) Like many writers of haiku, you may wish to confine your poem to what

can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. Mere sensory reports, however, will be meaningless unless they

make the reader feel something.

Here are eight more recent haiku written in English. (Don’t expect them all to observe a strict arrangement of

seventeen syllables, however.) Haiku, in any language, is an art of few words, many suggestions. A haiku starts us

thinking and telling. “So the reader,” Raymond Roseliep wrote, “keeps getting on where the poet got off.”

Etheridge Knight (1931–1991) Lee Gurga (b. 1949)

Making jazz swing in Visitor’s Room

Making jazz swing in Visitor’s Room—

Seventeen syllables AIN’T everything bolted down

No square poet’s job. except my brother.

Penny Harter (b. 1940) Jennifer Brutschy (b. 1960)

broken bowl Born Again

broken bowl Born Again

the pieces she speaks excitedly

still rocking. of death.

John Ridland (b. 1933) Connie Bensley (b. 1929)

The Lazy Man’s Haiku Last Haiku

out in the night No, wait a minute,

a wheelbarrowful I can’t be old already:

of moonlight. I’m just about to

Adelle Foley (b. 1940) Garry Gay (b. 1951)

Learning to Shave Hole in the ozone (Father Teaching Son)

A nick on the jaw

Hole in the ozone

The razor’s edge of manhood

My bald spot . . .

Along the bloodline.

sunburned

For Review and Further Study

John Keats (1795–1821)*

Bright Star! would I were (1819) steadfast as thou art

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

  Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

  Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,°

hermit

5

The moving waters at their priest-like task

  Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

10

  Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

QUESTIONS

1. Stars are conventional symbols for love and a loved one. (Love, Shakespeare tells us in a sonnet, “is the star

to every wandering bark.”) In this sonnet, why is it not possible for the star to have this meaning? How does

Keats use it?

2. What seems concrete and particular in the speaker’s observations?

3. Suppose Keats had said slow and easy instead of tender-taken in line 13. What would have been lost?

Experiment: Writing with Images

Taking the following poems as examples from which to start rather than as models to be slavishly copied, try to

compose a brief poem that consists largely of imagery.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)*

The Runner 1867

On a flat road runs the well-train’d runner;

He is lean and sinewy, with muscular legs;

He is thinly clothed—he leans forward as he runs,

With lightly closed fists, and arms partially rais’d.

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917)

Image (about 1910)

Old houses were scaffolding once

and workmen whistling.

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)*

El Hombre 1917

It’s a strange courage

You give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

Toward which you lend no part!

Chana Bloch (b. 1940)

Tired Sex 1998

We’re trying to strike a match in a matchbook

that has lain all winter under the woodpile:

damp sulphur

on sodden cardboard.

5

I catch myself yawning. Through the window

I watch that sparrow the cat

keeps batting around.

Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned—

You ought to read it, she said.

10

It’s great literature.

Robert Bly (b. 1926)*

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter 1962

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.

The only things moving are swirls of snow.

As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.

There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.

5

Driving around, I will waste more time.

Rita Dove (b. 1952)*

Silos 1989

Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky’s

shabby blue, they were always too white and

suddenly there.

They were never fingers, never xylophones, although once

5

a stranger said they put him in mind of Pan’s pipes

and all the lost songs of Greece. But to the townspeople

they were like cigarettes, the smell chewy and bitter

like a field shorn of milkweed, or beer brewing, or

a fingernail scorched over a flame.

10

No, no, exclaimed the children. They’re a fresh packet of chalk,

dreading math work.

They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They

were the ribs of the modern world.

Louise Glück (b. 1943)

Mock Orange 1985

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers

lighting the yard.

I hate them.

5

I hate them as I hate sex,

the man’s mouth

sealing my mouth, the man’s

paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,

10

the low, humiliating

premise of union—

In my mind tonight

I hear the question and pursuing answer

fused in one sound

15

that mounts and mounts and then

is split into the old selves,

the tired antagonisms. Do you see?

We were made fools of.

And the scent of mock orange

20

drifts through the window.

How can I rest?

How can I be content

when there is still

that odor in the world?

MOCK ORANGE. The mock orange is a flowering shrub with especially fragrant white blossoms and fruit that

resemble those of an orange tree.

Billy Collins (b. 1941)*

Embrace 1988

You know the parlor trick.

Wrap your arms around your own body

and from the back it looks like

someone is embracing you,

5

her hands grasping your shirt,

her fingernails teasing your neck.

From the front it is another story.

You never looked so alone,

your crossed elbows and screwy grin.

10

You could be waiting for a tailor

to fit you for a straitjacket,

one that would hold you really tight.

John Haines (b. 1924)

Winter News 1966

They say the wells

are freezing

at Northway where

the cold begins.

5

Oil tins bang

as evening comes on,

and clouds of

steaming breath drift

in the street.

10

Men go out to feed

the stiffening dogs,

the voice of the snowman

calls the white-

haired children home.

Stevie Smith (1902–1971)*

Not Waving but Drowning 1957

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

5

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

10

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

WRITING EFFECTIVELY

WRITERS ON WRITING

Ezra Pound

The Image 1913

An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term

“complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not

agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that

sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the

presence of the greatest works of art.

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF

DON’TS for those beginning to write verses. I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.

Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the

concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t

think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably

difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

From “A Few Don’ts”

WRITING ABOUT IMAGERY

Analyzing Images

Images are powerful things—thus the old saw, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” A poem, however, must

build its pictures from words—no mean feat. By taking note of its imagery, and watching how the nature of those

images evolves from start to finish, you can go a long way toward a better understanding of the poem. The

following steps can help:

• Make a short list of the poem’s key images. Be sure to write down the images in the order they appear,

because the sequence can be as important as the images themselves. (For example, a poem whose images

move from sunlight to darkness might well signify something different from one that begins with

darkness and concludes with sunlight.)

• Don’t forget to take the poem’s title into account. A title often points the way to important insights.

• Remember: not all images are visual. Images can draw on any or all of the five senses.

• Be sure to jot down key adjectives or other qualifying words. (T. E. Hulme’s image of “whistling”

workmen on page 754, for instance, implies something happier than “sweating” workmen would.)

• Go back through your list and take notes about what moods or attitudes are suggested by each image, and

by the movement from the first image to the last.

Let’s try this method on a short poem. An initial list of images in Robert Bly’s “Driving to Town Late to Mail

a Letter” (page 755) might look something like this:

cold and snowy night

deserted main street

mailbox door—cold iron

snowy night (speaker loves its privacy)

speaker drives around (to waste time)

Bly’s title also contains several crucial images. Let’s add them to the top of the list:

driving (to town)

late night

a letter (to be mailed)

Looking over our list, we see how the images provide an outline of the poem’s story. We also see how Bly begins

the poem without providing an initial sense of how his speaker feels about the situation. Is driving to town late on

a snowy evening a positive, negative, or neutral experience? By noting where (in line 4) the speaker reveals a

subjective response to an image (“There is a privacy I love in this snowy night”), we may also begin to grasp the

poem’s overall emotional structure. We might also note on our list how the poem begins and ends with the same

image (driving), but uses it for different effects. At the beginning, the speaker is driving for the practical purpose

of mailing a letter but at the end purely for pleasure.

Simply by noting the images from start to finish, we have already worked out a rough outline—all on a single

sheet of paper or a few inches of computer screen.

CHECKLIST

Thinking About Imagery

¸ List a poem’s key images, in the order in which they appear.

¸ Remember, images can draw on all five senses—not just the visual.

¸ List key adjectives or other qualifying words.

¸ Go through your list. What emotions or attitudes are suggested by each image?

¸ What is suggested by the movement from one image to the next? Remember that the order or sequence of

images is almost as important as the images themselves.

¸ Does the mood of the imagery change from start to finish?

¸ What does the poem’s title suggest?

WRITING ASSIGNMENT ON IMAGERY

Examining any poem in this chapter, demonstrate how its imagery helps communicate its general theme. Be

specific in noting how each key image contributes to the poem’s total effect. Feel free to consult criticism on the

poem but make sure to credit any observation you borrow exactly from a critical source. (See the chapter “Writing

About a Poem” for advice on both writing process and format guidelines.) Here is an essay written in response to

this assignment by Becki Woods, a student of Mark Bernier’s at Blinn College in Brenham, Texas.

sample student paper Becki Woods

Professor Bernier

English 220

23 February 2006

Bishop’s Use of Imagery in “The Fish”

Upon first reading, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” appears to be a simple fishing tale. A close investigation

of the imagery in Bishop’s highly detailed description, however, reveals a different sort of poem. The real theme

of Bishop’s poem is a compassion and respect for the fish’s lifelong struggle to survive. By carefully and

effectively describing the captured fish, his reaction to being caught, and the symbols of his past struggles to stay

alive, Bishop creates, through her images of beauty, victory, and survival, something more than a simple tale.

The first four lines of the poem are quite ordinary and factual:

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth. (1-4)

Except for tremendous, Bishop’s persona uses no exaggerations--unlike most fishing stories--to set up the situation

of catching the fish. The detailed description begins as the speaker recounts the event further, noticing something

signally important about the captive fish: “He didn’t fight” (5). At this point the poem begins to seem unusual:

most fish stories are about how ferociously the prey resists being captured. The speaker also notes that the

“battered and venerable / and homely” fish offered no resistance to being caught (8-9). The image of the

submissive attitude of the fish is essential to the theme of the poem. It is his “utter passivity [that] makes [the

persona’s] detailed scrutiny possible” (McNally 192).

Once the image of the passive fish has been established, the speaker begins an examination of the fish itself,

noting that “Here and there / his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wall-paper” (9-11). By comparing the

fish’s skin to wallpaper, the persona creates, as Sybil Estess argues, “implicit suggestions of both artistry and

decay” (713). Images of peeling wallpaper are instantly brought to mind. The comparison of the fish’s skin and

wallpaper, though “helpful in conveying an accurate notion of the fish’s color to anyone with memories of

Victorian parlors and their yellowed wallpaper . . . is,” according to Nancy McNally, “even more useful in

evoking the associations of deterioration which usually surround such memories” (192). The fish’s faded beauty

has been hinted at in the comparison, thereby setting up the detailed imagery that soon follows:

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down. (16-20)

The persona sees the fish as he is; the infestations and faults are not left out of the description. Yet, at the same

time, the fisher “express[es] what [he/she] has sensed of the character of the fish” (Estess 714).

Bishop’s persona notices “shapes like full-blown roses / stained and lost through age” on the fish’s skin (14-

15). The persona’s perception of the fish’s beauty is revealed along with a recognition of its faded beauty, which

is best revealed in the description of the fish’s being speckled with barnacles and spotted with lime. However, the

fisher observes these spots and sees them as rosettes--as objects of beauty, not just ugly brown spots. These

images contribute to the persona’s recognition of beauty’s having become faded beauty.

The poem next turns to a description of the fish’s gills. The imagery in “While his gills were breathing in /

the terrible oxygen” (22-23) leads “to the very structure of the creature” that is now dying (Hopkins 201). The

descriptions of the fish’s interior beauty--”the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers,” the colors “of his shiny

entrails,” and his “pink swim-bladder / like a big peony”--are reminders of the life that seems about to end (27-

28, 31-33).

The composite image of the fish’s essential beauty--his being alive--is developed further in the description

of the five fish hooks that the captive, living fish carries in his lip:

grim, wet, and weapon-like

hung five old pieces of fish-line

.................................

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth. (50-51, 54-55)

As if fascinated by them, the persona, observing how the lines must have been broken during struggles to

escape, sees the hooks as “medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom /

trailing from his aching jaw” (61-64), and the fisher becomes enthralled by re-created images of the fish’s fighting

desperately for his life on at least five separate occasions--and winning. Crale Hopkins suggests that “[i]n its

capability not only for mere existence, but for action, escaping from previous anglers, the fish shares the speaker’s

humanity” (202), thus revealing the fisher’s deepening understanding of how he must now act. The persona has

“all along,” notes Estess, “describe[d] the fish not just with great detail but with an imaginative empathy for the

aquatic creature. In her more-than-objective description, [the fisher] relates what [he/she] has seen to be both the

pride and poverty of the fish” (715). It is at this point that the narrator of this fishing tale has a moment of clarity.

Realizing the fish’s history and the glory the fish has achieved in escaping previous hookings, the speaker sees

everything become “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” (75)--and then unexpectedly lets the fish go.

Bishop’s “The Fish” begins by describing an event that might easily be a conventional story’s climax: “I

caught a tremendous fish” (1). The poem, however, develops into a highly detailed account of a fisher noticing

both the age and the faded beauty of the captive and his present beauty and past glory as well. The fishing tale is

not simply a recounting of a capture; it is a gradually unfolding epiphany in which the speaker sees the fish in an

entirely new light. The intensity of this encounter between an apparently experienced fisher in a rented boat and a

battle-hardened fish is delivered through the poet’s skillful use of imagery. It is through the description of the

capture of an aged fish that Bishop offers her audience her theme of compassion derived from a respect for the

struggle for survival.

Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Fish.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X. J.

Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 10th ed. New York: Longman, 2007. 746–47.

Estess, Sybil P. “Elizabeth Bishop: The Delicate Art of Map Making.” Southern Review 13 (1977): 713-17.

Hopkins, Crale D. “Inspiration as Theme: Art and Nature in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.” Arizona Quarterly

32 (1976): 200-202.

McNally, Nancy L. “Elizabeth Bishop: The Discipline of Description.” Twentieth-Century Literature 11 (1966):

192-94.

MORE TOPICS FOR WRITING

1. Apply the steps listed above to one of the poems in this chapter. Louise Glück’s “Mock Orange,” Billy

Collins’s “Embrace,” and Jean Toomer’s “Reapers” would each make a good subject. Make a brief list of

images, and jot down notes on what the images suggest. Now write a two-page description of this process—

what it revealed about the poem itself, and about reading poetry in general.

2. Choose a small, easily overlooked object in your home that has special significance to you. Write a

paragraph-long, excruciatingly detailed description of the item, putting at least four senses into play. Without

making any direct statements about the item’s importance to you, try to let the imagery convey the mood you

associate with it. Bring your paragraph to class, exchange it with a partner, and see if he or she can identify

the mood you were trying to convey.

3. Reread the section on haiku in this chapter. Write three or four haiku of your own and a brief prose account of

your experience in writing them. Did anything about the process surprise you?

Imagery

Imagery

MLL

MLL

MLL

MLL

Imagery

Imagery

Imagery

MLL

Imagery

MLL

MLL

About Haiku

Imagery

Contemporary Haiku

Imagery

MLL

MLL

MLL

For Review and Further Study

MLL

Imagery

MLL

For Review and Further Study

Imagery

Writing Effectively

Imagery

Woods 1

First sentence gives name of author and work

Writing Effectively

Woods 2

Thesis sentence

Topic sentence

Quotation from secondary source

Topic sentence

Essay moves systematically through poem, from start to finish

Imagery

Woods 3

Textual evidence, mix of long and short quotations

Transitional phrase begins topic sentence

Textual evidence, mix of long and short quotations

Writing Effectively

Woods 4

Topic sentence

Quotations from secondary sources

Conclusion

Imagery

Woods 5

Restatement of thesis, in light of all that comes before it.

Woods 6

Writing Effectively

EZRA POUND