Asia Pacific Journal of Research
Vol: I Issue XI, March 2014
ISSN: 2320-5504, E-ISSN-2347-4793
SYMBOLS AND IMAGES IN THE POETRY OF EZRA POUND
Dr. G. Arputhavel Raja, Assistant Professor of English, Annamalai University,
Annamalai Nagar – 608 002, Tamil Nadu, India
Dr. M. Madhavan, Assistant Professor of English, Annamalai University,
Annamalai Nagar – 608 002, Tamil Nadu, India
Ezra Pound holds a unique place in twentieth-century American literature. He is
the leader of the Imagist Movement. He is an innovator and argues for perfection of
poetry. He has introduced many poems of different languages through his poetic
translations. His works are the fusion of myth, culture, history, and literature. Though he
has his own political views, instead of examining the events themselves, he concentrates
on the universal moral issues.
The poet, in all ages, in all countries and in all languages employs images and
symbols to enhance the expression and create an impact on the reader. This clearly
reveals the deep bond between poetry, imagery and symbolism. Images and symbols are
the soul of poetry. When images are used collectively, we term them as “imagery”.
M.H.Abrams defines it in A Glossary of Literary Terms as “Still more commonly,
imagery, which is now used to signify figurative language, especially metaphors and
similies” (42). With the advent of Imagism, a radical change occurred in the use of
imagery. Imagists like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle, John Gould Fletcher,
and Richard Aldington were tired of the Romantic mode of expression. They declined
that they would use any subject, create their own rhythms, express in common speech and
present such images that are clear, precise and concentrated. The recurrent use of any
image coverts it into a symbol. The symbolist movement was started in France between
1870 and 1880. It reached England in 1890s. The prominent symbolists were Mallarme,
Baudelaire, Valine, Rimbaud, and Laforgue. Arthur Symon’sThe Symbolist Movement in
Literature (1899) left a deep impact on modern writers. The chief quality of symbolism
is its suggestiveness. Instead of indulging in direct expression, the symbolist represents
ideas and emotions by indirect suggestion.
Ezra Pound was influenced deeply by both the devices, imagery and symbols.
Besides, his vast knowledge and complexities of modern age created difficulties in his
path. Charles Feidelson, in his Symbolism and American Literature,says: “The American
mind from its beginning was harassed by a problem of expression”(76).
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Then there were numerous influences of Eliot, Dante, Aristotle, Shakespeare,
James Frazer, Freud, Jung, Chinese literature, Japanese literature, Buddhism, Indian
Philosophy, linguistic features of different world languages, different cultures around the
globe, and several classical writers too. To accumulate all knowledge and present it in a
systematic pattern is certainly no easy task. Therefore Pound emerged on the scene with
a new pattern of imagery and symbolism. Naturally it is complex. Instead of presenting
situations clearly, Pound’s images make his poetry obscure and difficult.
Pound’s works are noted for the synthesis of diverse kinds of poetry including the
poetic techniques of different languages and different cultures. He lived in the period of
the polished formalism, symbolism, the imagist values of economy and precision of
expression and the assimilation of aims and methods usually associated with prose
fiction. Though it takes different forms in individual poets, they generally share the
feeling that they are moving in a new direction. The sense of a dawning of new age is
underscored by certain crucial shifts from the tradition. The decision to liberate art from
the chains of the past is translated into energetic action by Ezra Pound’s imagist doctrine.
Lentricchia examines the modernist ideals and Emerson’s influence behind
Pound's ambitious innovation in The Cantos. Lentricchia in “Ezra Pound’s American
Book of wonders” observes: “The form he invented is at once the representation of a
culture he thought to be in fragments and an offering of hope for a different kind of
future, rooted in the narrative of common lineage and destiny” (387).
The visual images, the sensory associations that come up while reading the poem,
are the core of the images and symbols created by Pound. In Pound’s “In a Station of the
Metro,” there are only two lines as we read: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/
Petals on a wet, black bough” (1-2).
There is a sense of energy of life, a kind of human brightness. The human face is
what blooms, renews, and shines in the dark. Hence, it is a wonderful illustration of the
meaning using beautiful imagery. The sight of those human blossoms in darkness is
disconnected, but also profoundly affirmative. The more these things do not have in
common on the surface level, the greater is the level of tension, the greater the sense of
cognitive dissolution for the reader. The readers feel something happen in the yoking of
those faces and those petals. The presence of the word “like” in the second line would
make the image seem little less crucial. The imagery and the heavy abstract symbols stay
within the mind of the reader, because the ground has been laid by that initial abstraction,
apparition. Without such powerful images, poetry would not have the same hold on the
memory of the reader. The way apparition points us towards the kind of experience the
perceiver has, more profound than these faces in the crowd.
In “A Station of the Metro,” the readers are not confronting a symbol that stands
for one thing, as they are confronting a metaphor which is far more alive in its
associations, far more ambiguous, though not so much that it does not point in a specific
direction. The readers are directed into a rich and complex territory of renewal and
human connections.
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Just contrary to the two line poem “A Station of the Metro,” “The Canto” by
Pound is a long incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a Canto. Most of it
was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned
and the early Cantos were finally published. It is widely considered to present formidable
difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant
work of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. “Portrait d'une Femme” is the
embodiment of a modern framed metaphor. Pound opens the poem with a deviation from
traditional poetry since he makes use of conceit, which was used by the metaphysical
poets. But Pound’s ambiguous words, which have different and simultaneously relevant
meanings, lead the readers to uncertainty. Besides, deviation makes the poem a modern
one: "Your mind and you are out Sargasso Sea"(1).
Pound addresses a lady even in the opening line and compares the mind of the
beloved lady to a sea covered by plants like sea weed. Pound talks about Sargasso Sea in
the first line and the Londoners who came to that area to see her in the second line,
"London has swept about you this score year" (2)
The second picture is very different from the first one. The combination of such
shattered images is the key to unlock the theme of the poem. He has used a number of
words which demand many references to understand the meaning. Every line has the
capacity of these ambiguous meanings. “Portrait d'une femme” is taken from French, and
it means the portrait of a lady. Throughout this poem, the word “you” refers to the
woman mentioned in the title. Sargasso refers to the section of the North Atlantic Ocean
between the West Indies and the Azores. It is famous for its motionless body of water,
which is covered by seaweeds, the plants that grow in the sea. So the line suggests that
the lady and her mind are similar to Sargasso Sea. They are motionless and calm, and
they are covered with seaweed. Londoners have been coming to the area to see her for
twenty years. But she is most probably originally French as the title suggests. She has
been influenced by different cultural currents in London. Moreover, as far as the word
“mind” suggests, it sounds as if Londoners have come to that body of water.
In order to go back to the first line of the poem, Pound uses the word “ships,”
which refers to the sea: "London has swept about you this score years/and bright ships
left you this or that in fee" (2-3).
Pound mingles the meaning of ship and the identity of the lady in the following
lines and celebrates the intellectual atmosphere of the poem, and suggests that she is the
best choice of the Londoners. But she has two choices before her; to be among
intellectuals or act as the usual one. She prefers to be among the intellectuals and even to
be considered second, which means she accepts her inferiority, rather than acting in the
usual way.
It is a different poem for feminist and anti-feminist critics since Pound refers to
men as the “dull” citizens, and, at the same time, Pound attacks the intellectual women of
the post-war world. He attacks the intellectual women after the World Wars for being
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second class citizens among male intellectuals and accuses them of accepting their
inferiority in a male-intellectual circle:
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up
And now you pay one. Yes your richly pay
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestions.(11- 16)
She is patient, and is waiting among the intellectuals. After these ideas, Pound
compares her, as in the first part, with a ship. The ship has left the things and like the
ship, she is waiting for the pieces of knowledge from the male intellectuals. As she gains
knowledge, she can give it to the person who comes. If a man comes to her for lack of
knowledge, she will give him knowledge.
Pound continues the game by combing the mind and trophies, which refers to
pieces of knowledge, and the ship, and the line as a whole suggests that she will become
wise. Suggestion leads the readers to the mind of the lady and these suggestions can
inspire her, and the poet asks her to listen to them:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
these are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you; (21-29)
The poet says that she tells a tale or two tales which can be pregnant with
Mandrakes. Mandrakes are plants in Europe and Asia which have yellow or purple
flowers and a forked root resembling a human body. It was formerly believed to have
magical powers: giving the ability of women’s pregnancy. The word “mandrakes” may
refer to Sargasso Sea and the covering of the sea weed. These sea weeds are formerly
used for pregnancy.
In the first line, Pound makes the “mind” close to Sargasso Sea, if one considers
that the coverings of the sea, the sea weed or the mandrakes can cause pregnancy.
Consequently, the readers can refer these words to the mind too. Therefore, this line has
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two meanings: the woman who would be pregnant or is pregnant with knowledge or
ideas. Though Pound admits that her tales can be useful, he adds further details that they
are not usually useful since they are stupid and she may never use those tales to fit a
corner, for making something. The sperms of whales spread all over the sea. Readers can
infer that Pound tries to refer to both the ship that sail in the sea and the man who comes
to her to make her pregnant, with new ideas. The old work, or the sperms, is going to be
enriched by her, since she tries to bring new ideas. She enriches the ideas; the result is
something with a good smell. These are described as benefits to the woman. She keeps
some of them and enriches, changes and finally gives them back.
New ships will come and leave her: the word “deciduous” refers to the idea of the
leaving of these things from her. Things are floating up and down, and the light and
depth are going to be changed. According to the words the poet uses in previous line,
“tarnished,” and “gaudy”(22), it is clear that since she is not original, the ships have left
her the oddments that are wonderful old work, but they are tarnished.
Pound is conscious of his social responsibilities. Though many people criticized
him of his philosophy and the life he lived, through many of his poems he could express
his social responsibility and could protest against degrading values. “The Patterns” of
Pound is an excellent evidence for his satirical techniques, which has a therapeutic
function. The title of the poem itself suggests the collage of images, though it has only
four lines in it. The small poem of Pound “The Patterns” leads the reader to the degrading
moral values among the rich modern society:
Erinna is a model parent
Her children have never discovered her adulteries
Lalage is also a model parent
Her offspring are fat and happy.(1-4)
Erinna is a common English name which stands for upper class English women.
Erinna represents the hypocrisies of the aristocratic immoral life. Among them, the club
meetings are unusual and Erinna might be selected as a model parent. There is no hint to infer
anything about her familiar status. Pound attacks the adulterous and immoral existence of
modern society. Though Erinna is adulterous, she could hide her personal physical pleasures
from her children who could not even identify the real Erinna. Pound takes the debating
image of mother as the star of discussion in the poem. Suggesting Erinna as the model parent,
Pound criticizes the club culture and coffee house pretensions among the upper class.
Pound's attack on the upper class ladies becomes sharper in the second portrait of
Lalage, another model parent who often makes her children fat and happy. By making the
children fat and happy, the upper class ladies are committing adulteries. By offering the
physical comforts and satisfying the materialistic pursuits of the next generation, the
mother image celebrates upper class adulterous parties. Though the happy children are
fat, they cannot discover the loop holes in the changing culture which awaits to trap even
them.
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“The Encounter” is Pound's love poem. The poem presents different images
which are significant to the proper understanding of the poem. Pound could express the
intensity of the affection:
All the while they were talking the new morality.
Her eyes explored me.
And when I arouse to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.(1-5)
The attitudes of the lady and others are in contrast. The lady in the poem
represents the physical world of pleasures and the crowd represents the moral principles.
The two extremes are linked together by the image of the speaker. While others are
discussing morality, the woman fails to remove her eyes from him. As he rises to go, she
with her erotic thoughts in mind pulls him back to her.
Without paying attention to the moral principles, the woman attempts to flirt the
poet. “The Encounter” is a poem which stands between the world of love and morality.
Following imagist principles, Pound presents the two opposite images in the poem.
Avoiding unnecessary words, Pound presents an emotional complex of images.
Little Aurelia is at the centre of the poem. Her name has its origin in Latin. The
meaning of Aurelia is golden-haired and the name is not common. The golden haired
little girl represents the future citizens of the society and the family position of the
modern society which is declining. The poem can be read as the extension of the theme
of Pound where we encounter with two model parents who are adulterous. Children in the
poem are innocent without bothering the adultery committed by their mothers. But in
“Society,”Aurelia is a grown up girl, "Who had laughed on eighteen summers"(3).
The degenerating culture of the modern society is waiting eagerly to trap the new
members. This culture can harm the innocent pleasures of Aurelia's childhood. By
presenting the venomous web of the declining culture, Pound argues that Aurelia or the
next generation is under the threat as the new victim.
The lovers are portrayed romantically in the poem “Alba” by Pound: "As cool as
the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-Valley / She lay beside me in the dawn" (2). The flower
lily of the valley is pure white, symbolising purity and innocence, and Pound compares
the beloved with Lilly. It is assumed that the voice of the poem considers this woman to
be pure as the flower. The Lilly of the valley can be used to portray heavenly things. So
the possible image that the poem can give to the reader is that of a heavenly light emitting
from this woman from the dimness of the dawn. The joy of love and beauty of the lady
are brighter than the dawn. The short poem takes most of Pound's writing style and has
the important features of imagism. The cool, pale, wet leaves suggest the feeling and
mood of the poem.
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In Pound’s poetry, the themes of economics, governance, and culture are integral
to its content. The most striking feature of the text is the inclusion of Chinese characters
as well as quotations from many languages other than English. The range of allusion to
historical events is very broad and abrupt changes occur with little transition. There is
also wide geographical reference, Pound added to his earlier interests in the classical
Mediterranean Culture and East Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern
Italy, the beginnings of the United States, England of the seventeenth century, and details
from Africa he had obtained from different sources. The Cantoslacks any plot or definite
ending and it may appear on first reading to be chaotic or structureless. Eric Hayot in
“Critical Dreams: Orientialism, Modernism and the Meaning of Pound’s China” focuses
on Ezra Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry and comments”:
No figure of twentieth century literature has had a more overt relation to
China than Ezra Pound. From the early moments of his career in London
to his final days in Italy Pound made China part of his general project to
rethink the nature of the west, to discover in poetry the best that humans
had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. As a young man,
he translated Chinese poetry into English, and through poetry developed
an aesthetic theory rooted in an ontology of Chinese writing.(511-23)
Pound had an unerring eye for talent and was tireless in his efforts to promote the
work of those he admired. The issue of incoherence of the work reflected in the early
Cantos shows that Pound has been unable to make his materials cohere.
Sicari argues that Pound's explanation of heroic action in his pre-war Cantos
helped formulate his later professed admiration for Fascism (145-68). Pound and T.S.
Eliot have both approached the subject of fragmentation of human experience. “The
Cantos”can be seen as taking a position between the mythic unity of Eliot’s “The Waste
Land” and James Joyce’s technique of flow of consciousness, and attempting to work out
how history as fragment and personality is shattered by modern existence.
The symbolic structure of Pound’s poem “The Cantos” also makes use of an
opposition between darkness and light. Images of light are used variously to represent the
ideas of divinity, the artistic impulse, love-–both sacred and physical love--and good
governance, amongst other things. The moon is frequently associated in the poem with
creativity, while the sun is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and
social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two. Watts in Reckoning”
attempts to define Pound's The Cantos in light of the author's method, tone, goal, and
ultimately whether it effectively disseminates its stated aims.(98-114)
But Pound, the creative artist, appears more frank in his poem “In Durance”: “I
am homesick after mine own kind /And ordinary people touch me not / And I am
homesick” (12-14). The poetical situation faced by Pound in the first decade of twentieth
century is clearly given in his poem “Swinburne: A Critique”:
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I am Swinburne, ruler in mystery.
None know the ending.
Blazes a-blending in Splendor
Of glory none know the meaning on,
I am that paints the rainbow of the Sunset
And the end of all dreams. (8-13)
These lines are included as a brilliant evocation of Pound which he himself
frequently created in his own early poems-–a land of dreams and sorrows derived not
simply from Swinburne, but also from Rossetti and the other Pre-Raphaelites with whom
Swinburne began his career, and also from the followers of Swinburne, the decadent
poets of the nineties, Dowson, Davidson, Lionel Johnson, and, especially from the early
poems of Yeats, with his Celtic variations on the Swinburnian dream. Apart from the
modern hectic material world, the poet pictures a kind of poetic world where he is free
and appears to be creative.
Twentieth century American poetry witnessed a time of radical innovation in the
first two decades, fatefully truncated by World War I. These changes can be aptly
summarised as the consolidation of gains during the Twenties, a detour into political
activism in the thirties and early forties, a fine flowering of the great modernists after
world war, and a post-modern break with the modernist beginning in the fifties; a poetic
response to war again in the sixties and from the seventies onward the emphasis on both
theories and innovations. During the twentieth century, the language of war became
increasingly the language of the state. The poets identified, analysed and sought to
counter with their own linguistic means. In response to World War I, poets such as Ezra
Pound, E.E. Cummings and Archibald McLeish employed distanced ironies.
The poet is powerfully aware of the way that poetry and the rhetoric of war have
shamefully consorted in the past, and the result is a kind of antipoetic mode. Pound's
experimentations have constantly challenged the readers. Goldensohn in “Pound and
Antisemitism,” disagrees with the various rationales “often given for Pound's antiSemitism and that despite the historical tendencies to forgive and forget such
indiscretions, Pound's anti-Semitism continues to matter”(399). His life as an expatriate
in Venice, London, Paris and Rapallo clouded his identity as an American; the war years
obscured it when he delivered a series of anti-American and anti-semitic radio broadcast
supporting Mussolini. It is very clear from his words which appeared in “Pound, Thayer,
Watson and the Dial, A story in Letters”: “I am terribly, appallingly, but I am not sure
about the 'deplorably' American" (169).
Throughout Pound's poetic career, he sought the objective presentation of material
which he believed would stand on its own without the need for expressionistic or
romantic attributes. Moncef observes Pound's disdain for gold as a symbol of evil.
According to Moncef: “the malevolent aspect of gold exists in its own right throughout
Pound's works; however, within this negative imaginary dimension of gold, there also
lies its positive function as a master-signifier of discursive and economic authority” (11742).
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Thus, when a reader analyses Pound’s poems, he arrives at the conclusion that it
is because of the skilful use of the powerful language that Pound’s poems, become
popular. Pound is the author of different treatises. His artistic development reflects his
abiding effort to revive modern art and society in a new unity of past and present. When
Pound treats a major theme, it gets more charm through the use of his poetic
language and powerful images. Thus, Pound’s poems become the media of his thought.
His use of symbols and images makes the theme and form of his poems, more attractive
and meaningful. Avoiding the unnecessary words which do not contribute to the meaning
of the poem pound presents powerful symbols and images following the doctrine of the
Imagism.
Works Consulted
1. Pound, Ezra. The Collected Shorter Poems Of Ezra Pound. New York : New
Directions,1926.
2. Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt, Harpham. AGlossary of Literary Terms. Boston:
Wordsworth, 2009.
3. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land: and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
4. Feidelson, Charles. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
5. Goldensohn, Barry. “Pound and Antisemitism.” Yale Review 75.3(June 1986): 399.
6. Hayot, Eric. "Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism and the Meaning of Pound's China."
Twentieth
Century Literature 45.4 (winter 1999): 511.
7. Lentricchia, Frank. “Ezra Pound’s American Book of Wonders” South Atlantic Quarterly
92.2 (Spring 1993): 387.
8. Moncef, M. Pound’s Poetic Career. New York: Cambridge UP, 1983.
9. Sicari, Stephen. “Reading Pound’s Politics: Ulysses as Fascist Hero.” Peideuma 17.23
(Winter1988): 145.
10. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1899.
11. Sutton Walter. Pound,Thayer, Watson and the Dial, A Story in Letters, Gainewville: UP of
Florida, 1994: 169.
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