SunWinks! January 18, 2015: Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

Dearest SunWinkers:

Back at Week 8 of the old Gather column, the poetics topic was the symbol. I am as qualified to discuss this topic today as I was then, which is to say, pretty darn little. Somewhere on the level of, “I don’t know much about symbols, but I know what I like.” Symbolism is a complex subject, the scope of which is on the order of “mythology” or “imagery.” Thousands of books have been written on the subject.

This discussion will be free-wheeling, personal, selective, and shamelessly borrowing from the syntheses of more-qualified thinkers. For the purpose of our discussion, the symbol is an image which signifies the theme of a poem (in our case) in some way. By “signifies” we mean: the symbol is a visual image which represents an idea in an abstract way, like a hieroglyph or a heraldic symbol on a coat of arms. We know what the symbol means because it’s a widely understood element of our culture.

Flags are symbols, as are the cross, a shaft of wheat, a pyramid. The symbolic value may be moral, historical, emotional, or metaphorical. The surface meaning of the symbol should be more or less widely known or intuitively obvious—this is whence the symbol gets its power. The best metaphors, on the other hand, make unexpected associations: “She the sickle; I, poor I, the rake…,” Theodore Roethke, “I Knew A Woman”.

The symbol can be a well-known abstract symbol with unambiguous emotional content, such as a flag, a cross, or a swastika (Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”). The power of a flag was nowhere better expressed than by Simon Wiesenthal describing the moment of his liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp:

I could not take my eyes from the stars of the flag, symbols not only of the States of the Union, but of all the things we had lost in the Holocaust. Every star had acquired a meaning of its own: One was the star of hope, and that of justice, of tolerance, friendship, of brotherly love, of understanding, and so on.

“Christ In the Sepulchre Guarded by Angels” by William Blake

A symbol can be an iconic visual image from history or culture, such as the Sphinx, the Eiffel Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge. In Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” the way he substitutes the image of the Sphinx for the second coming of Christ lends the poem enormous symbolic value and emotional power. Jack Kerouac’s poem “Hymn,” an unironic, deeply felt theophany, Beat-style, begins with the image of the Brooklyn Bridge.

A symbol can be something as subtle as the environment of the poem. In Robert Frost’s “Desert Places,”  the barren, snow-covered desert symbolizes the narrator’s loneliness. “Place is crucial to T.S. Eliot,” observes Jay Parini in Why Poetry Matters [New Haven CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2008, p. 166]. The first of Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” begins in a symbolically charged rose garden, evoking echoes of paradise, purity, and innocence: “Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children…”  In my “The Ring”, the highly symbolic setting is a boxing ring.

Many of my poems use religious images for symbolic effect, for example, “Perpetual Adoration”, in which the monstrance, the opulent, ornate stand used to house and display the Host, the “Sacred Species,” for Benediction and adoration, serves as a central symbol for the poem’s theme of misplaced worship. Symbols of Christian theology and lore figure heavily in the iconography of my writing for the simple reason that I was a cradle Catholic, the product of a Catholic upbringing and education, and active in the Church for 50 years.

William Blake, portrait by Thomas Phillips

The mystical poet William Blake, cited as often as anybody in the literature as a symbolist, frequently invokes the symbol of the Lamb, in both senses of Christ the Sacrificial Lamb and the innocent sheep of His flock:

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, & he is mild;
He became a little child.

(“The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence)

Mary Oliver’s 2006 volume Thirst is rich with Christian symbolism, exploring her longing for the consolations of faith as she copes with the loss of her partner of forty-plus years:

I had such a longing for virtue, for company.
I wanted Christ to be as close as the cross I wear.
I wanted to read and serve, to touch the altar linen.
Instead I went back to the woods where not a single tree turns its face away.

(“More Beautiful than the Honey Locust Tree Are the Words of the Lord”)

The Prompt:

Write a poem or sketch which uses a symbol. Don’t spell the symbolism out for us—let the symbol speak for itself. But don’t just throw it in there and forget about it. Like rhyme and meter, once you’ve worked a symbol into your poem, your work is not done; it is just beginning. Think about the connections it makes with the rest of the poem. Consider using the image ironically, playing with or against the conventional meaning of the symbol.

Love,

Doug

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