Symbols in Poetry |
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If you study the symbol in literature and art, you will find soon that the symbol operates across history and cultures. While it is possible to create symbols that operate in a specific and peculiar or idiosyncratic way in a specific work of art, the likelihood is that the image which symbolizes also fits in a long history of its uses in other circumstances and other cultures. Therefore we can talk about traditional symbols some of which we have already encountered in fiction and the poems we have read. Earlier in the fiction unit we established that the only way to know if an image is symbolic is to read the work for confirmation of the symbolic status. It is as if a pattern of symbolic potential emerges. For example, your editors interpret the symbols in Sharon Old's poem, Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941, and then say, "The whole array of dead bodies in the poem might be said to be symbolic as well. As a group, they stand for the human waste that the war has produced, and their dramatic visual presence provides the poem with a dramatic visualization of . . .war [as] . . .no time for decency, not even the decency of burial" (952). I shall offer a different interpretation of the dead as symbolic of the indomitable force for rebirth into life, for conquering even the humiliation of such a death, which the human spirit has and which the poem enacts. I argue for that reading based on the pattern of figures of speech which the poet uses to describe the bodies, all of which culminate for me in an impression more optimistic than your editors. The potential for rebirth is clear in the comparisons to the "tree's ball of roots/ when it waits to be planted" and the "cocoons that will split down the center/when the new life inside is prepared;" even the remaining corpses want "to come back" to life, no matter how bleak. Whether you see the poem a bit more optimistically as I do or you agree with the editors that the scene is entirely bleak, the point I am making is that your sense of the symbol's meaning comes from patterns of meaning which you build up from contexts--primarily from the rest of the work, but also from outside the work. Your editors call this "significance built in because of past usage in literature, or tradition, or the stories a culture develops to explain itself and its values" (955). Go to this very interesting site on cultural entomolgy and read one of their essays on the symbolic significance of bugs ("Beetles as Religious Symbols" by Yves Cambefort, Paris, France) in this case the scarab. I don't imagine one could ever write a poem about scarab beetles without having to take into account the weight of its cross cultural symbolic significance. Thus it is possible to have dictionaries of symbols, one of which is online (The Dictionary of Symbolism Originally Constructed by Allison Protas Augmented and refined in 1997 by Geoff Brown and Jamie Smith) but there are many other far better ones available. If you want to see if there is some standard symbolic meaning for objects, you might try using the Encylopedia Britannica online. For example, you can access an entire section on "Religious Symbolism and Iconography" Encyclopędia Britannica Online. Finally, we can begin to understand the meaning of the symbolic poem in the sense your text defines it as "a highly individualized one dependent on an internal system introduced by the individual poet" (957). These are the symbols which, in order to fully understand, we have to have read the rest of the poems a poet has written. All the poems together provide the context and pattern thinking that influences the meaning of any one instance. While you probably have not read enough poetry by Blake to understand fully the rose image in "The Sick Rose," or even to fully grasp what the editors are explaining about the poem based on their understanding of Blake, still I am sure you can grasp the overall idea of the symbol which becomes a special, recurrent and unifying theme in an artist's entire set of works. For an exercise which pulls together your understanding of figures of speech and symbols use the very extensive information available to you from the LITWEB site as well as your powers of analysis and exploration to list and discuss the figurative language in JOHN DONNE, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning RPOL (1260) AND (LITWEB)
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