Short Story Writing

UNIT 4 IMAGERY AND SYMBOLS

Structure

4.0 Aims and Objectives

4.1 Introduction
4.2 Imagery
4.3 Symbols
4.4 Metaphor
4.5 Language and Diction
4.5.1 Words in Poetry
4.6 Metrical Structures
4.6.1 Rhyme
4.6.2 Meter
4.7 Innovations
4.8 Summing Up
4.9 Answers to Check Your Progress

4.0 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This Unit explains the use of images and symbols in writing poetry. It also shows
you how to use diction/language to achieve the intended effect. By the end of
this Unit you will be able to understand how:
• an image is at the root of all poetry
• images can be conveyed by symbols, similes or metaphors
• you can use symbols to express intense feelings
• to identify symbols in poems, which by extension will lend greater depth to
your own poetry by the effective use of symbols,
• to use language in a manner which will enrich your writing and
• metaphors can enhance the effect of your poems

4.1 INTRODUCTION
The terms ‘image’ and ‘imagery’ have a wide range of meaning and correlations.
An image need not signify a mental picture alone. Images can be literal, perceptual
or conceptual. Again, they can be visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, abstract or
kinesthetic. That is why the term, ‘imagery’ is used to suggest the representation
of sensory or extra-sensory experience through the medium of language. Poets
may fuse different kinds of images to produce the desired poetic effects. Indeed,
the images in a poem may not be readily classifiable, since they may merge into
one another or even overlap. All poetry works through images. It is through
images that a poet depersonalizes and universalizes his experience. No matter
how personal an account, a poetic statement, because it works in and through 95
Modes of Creative Writing images, becomes a general statement. An image thus acts as an interface between
the reader and the poet.
The term, ‘symbol’, is derived from the Greek work, ‘symbolon’ meaning mark,
token or sign. It is an animate or inanimate object signifying or standing for
some other thing. It is different from an allegorical sign in that whereas a symbol
exists, an allegorical sign is only arbitrary. For instance, the lion symbolizes
strength and courage, and a dove peace. Likewise, even actions and features
such as a clenched fist, and arms raised above the head symbolize aggressiveness
and surrender. A symbol helps the poet to express complex, mixed or intense
feelings. Since a poem is essentially a symbolic mode of expression it is through
symbols alone that a poet articulates his feelings. They should, however, be
used judiciously, because their excessive use can also harm a poem, dissipate its
impact on the reader’s mind.
Diction is a writer’s particular choice of words and style. This choice is especially
difficult in poetry where words often take on additional meanings depending
upon the context. For most of us, English is a second language, so we should be
specially aware of the precise meanings of the words we use. We should aim at
lucidity of expressions rather than obscurity or complexity. The idea is to use
words in such a way that your thoughts are exactly transferred to the mind of the
reader.
The simplest definition of metaphor, as also the oldest one, is that it is a shortened
or an implied simile. A simile makes explicit comparison between two unlike
things indicated by the words, ‘like’, ‘as’ or ‘than’. When we say, ‘Arjun fights
like a lion’, we are using a simile in which a comparison is made by using the
word, ‘like’. Where such a comparison is made without using such words as
‘like’ or ‘as’ ⎯ as in the following example, ‘On the battlefield Arjun is a lion’ –
we are using a metaphor. In other words, when a speaker says that something is,
or is equivalent to, something in most ways actually unlike it, he is using a
figure of speech called a metaphor. In other words, it is a description of one
thing in terms of another. Comparison between two things, unlike each other, is
the basis of both simile and metaphor. The point(s) of analogy must be logically
clear, whether the comparison is explicitly stated, as in a simile, or only implied,
as in a metaphor.

4.2 IMAGERY
Whatever else they share in common, prose and verse use images differently in
their narrative and lyric modes. Imagery in prose rarely, if ever, attains to the
power of a general statement with universal significance, as it does in poetry.
This is partly due to the fact that the lyric mode functions in and through images.
Often, an image is dismantled and reassembled in the course of a single poem;
equally often, the reverse procedure is adopted. The greatest master in the use of
images, among prose writers, Franz Kafka, seems to actually feel and think
through images: with the result that they assume an allegorical universality that
most other symbols used by other prose writers cannot even begin to pretend to
emulate: The Castle, The Trial, ‘Metamorphosis’ The Country Doctor and the
killing-machine in ‘In the Penal Settlement’ are some good examples. Consider
the following lines from A.K. Ramanujan’s ‘Of Mothers, among other things’:
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 ………… Imagery and Symbols

But her hands are a wet eagle’s

two black pink-crinkled feet,
one talon crippled in a garden
trap set for a mouse. Her saris
do not cling: they hang, loose
feather of a onetime wing.
The image of the bird is one of the images woven into the complex tapestry of
this beautiful poem. We come to these lines after a fine and complex image of
rain; hence the wet eagle. See how it’s broken up into a crippled talon and ‘the
loose feather of a onetime wing’. By the end of the poem, all the relevant bits
and parts of the main images have fused to form a composite whole, and are not
and cannot be, separated from one another. In fact, the structure of the poem is
indistinguishable from the dismantlement/reassembly of the main image(s) of
the poem.
Consider this poem:
In this triple-baked continent
women don’t etch angry eyebrows
on mud walls.
Patiently they sit
like empty pitchers
on the mouth of the village well
pleating hope in each braid
of their Mississippi-long hair
looking deep into the water’s mirror
for the moisture in their eyes.
with zodiac doodling on the sands
they guard their tattooed thighs
waiting for their men’s return
till even the shadows
roll up their contours
and are gone
beyond the hills.
(Shiv K. Kumar)
This beautiful poem is given to us in its entirety in three short and intense
sentences. Consider the simple use of simile (like empty pitchers) and metaphor
(Mississippi-long hair) which form part of a complex pattern in the lyrical use of
imagery. Take the water motif: the ground is prepared for it in the very first line
of the poem (‘in this triple-baked continent’) which will later bring the poem to
a close (‘roll up their contours/and are gone/beyond the hills’). The women sit
like empty pitchers on the mouth of the village well; barren, empty, dry, as-yet-
unfulfilled and waiting for their men’s return. The water image now passes from
the pitcher and the village well to pleating hope (the waiting, the hoping) in each
braid of their ‘mississippi-long hair’. Here the imagery of water is transformed
to its reflective qualities so that it mirrors or gives back the image of tears in
their eyes. 97
Modes of Creative Writing Notice how this intricately calibrated image of water is married to a growing
complexity of concepts like light and dryness, emptiness and waiting, guarding
and hoping, and shadow and darkness. And this graceful movement is brought
to a close in these short sentences. The poem as a whole would seem to symbolize
a certain feminine patience.
Also, examine these groups of images: ‘tattooed thighs’, ‘doodlings on the sands’
and, ‘angry eyebrows on mud walls’; all the images are related to women; see
how inextricably they are woven into those words in the poem which carry a
heavy emotional load.
Check Your Progress 1
i) What is the relationship between an image and various figures of speech?
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(Check your answer with that given at the end of the Unit)

4.3 SYMBOLS
Poetry, like music, conveys ‘feeling’. We all experience half-expressed feelings⎯
intense jubilation, deep despair, hair-pulling, vaulting ambition, dark depression,
high exaltation in our own lives. But if we are asked to express our feelings,
most of us will just mumble. We find language too inadequate to express, to the
exact degree, our feelings. But poets somehow manage to find words to express
their feelings. They use various devices to catch the intensity ⎯soft rhythms for
soft feeling, jagged rhythms for intellectualized feeling, exalted rhythms for higher
exaltation, lilting and cooing for courtship, etc. etc. Naturally, the reader will
miss a good deal if he does not keep pace with the suggestive rhythm of the
verse. But some feelings are lawless. They are too complex to keep to the rhythm.
Symbols, float between a very concrete image at one extreme end and a very
intense feeling at the other. A symbol half-reveals and half-conceals its meaning.
It employs a concrete image only to hide an intensity of meaning which has
become too hurtful to state explicitly. It draws on the conventions of language.
For instance, a ‘wolf’ is conventionally believed to be a killer; unlike a fox who
is believed to be a slinker, though he could also kill. In other words, a symbol
employs ‘association’, not direct meanings, to carry out its double function of
half-revealing and half-concealing its meaning. A good symbol enriches the
meaning by concealment. The cleverer the concealment, the richer the meaning.
Look at these lines:
The paper is whiter
For these black lines.
(Wallace Stevens)
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This is an image without specific meaning; nevertheless, it has a sufficient Imagery and Symbols
meaning complete in itself.
I shall show you fear in a handful of dust.
(T.S.Eliot)
Such self-sufficience of meaning is a mark of the highest creative genius. How
a concrete image becomes meaningful is hard to explain; but we can vaguely
explain the process as ‘suggestion’ ⎯what our Poetics has described through
terms like ‘Dhwani’ or ‘Vjyanjana’. Most poets are aware of a faculty which
can see meaning in inanimate objects, e.g. ‘stone’ for hard, cold, dead
unresponsiveness. They employ these meanings by strengthening the force of
the context. But not always!
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm….
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,….
(Blake)
There is here no contextual support. Yet, this poem seems to sum up the sickness
of the world. The word, ‘rose’, is an image of health, freshness and hope, sufficient
in meaning. It is an ‘image’, yet acts as a symbol.
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, the curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
(Andrew Marvell)
The paradisal experience is revealed in the recurrent images of simple natural
rural pleasures. The consistent, reiterative, repetitive images of natural joy create
(‘evoke’) an atmosphere (‘context’) of well-being. No single image is a ‘symbol’,
but cumulatively they create (‘evoke’) a whole context of a paradise on Earth.
The passage thus becomes ‘symbolic’.

4.4 METAPHOR
The command of metaphor has been held to be the hall mark of a poet and so its
importance to the creation of a poem cannot be overemphasized. Metaphor is
not a mere rhetorical device⎯ a figure of speech⎯but a means of making a
poem highly evocative and thus enlarging its significance and power. The issues
that the use of metaphor in poetry raises are complex in that the metaphor, in the
modern view, is a ‘stereoscope of ideas’.
Although, superficially, the distinction between simile and metaphor looks simple,
it is not really so. They differ in significance. Simile merely joins two separate 99
Modes of Creative Writing entities. The metaphor, on the other hand, attempts an identification or fusion
of two objects to make a new one that shares in some degree the attributes or
qualities of both. While in a simile the comparison is straightforward and often
prosaic, in a metaphor an altogether new kind of association is created by
discovering and combining resemblances between two otherwise dissimilar
objects. Simile being more explicit than metaphor is, therefore, less evocative.
However, it must be remembered that a metaphor has its origin in a simile.

It must also be noted that the traditional definition of metaphor as an abbreviated

simile has been undergoing a subtle change. It is difficult nowadays to find
many examples in poetry of metaphors which are derived from simple, logical
comparisons as in the following poem by Sir Walter Raleigh:

What is our Life?

What is our life? a play of passion;

Our mirth, the music of divisions;
Our mother’s wombs the tiring-houses be
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
The poet compares our life to ‘a play of passion’. ‘Play’ here is the metaphor for
life, and since the two terms are basically unlike, the poet underscores in the
lines that follow the qualities ‘life’ and ‘play’ share in common. The brevity and
triviality of stage-plays has been compared to the brevity and triviality of life⎯
‘this short comedy’. In order to further emphasize the points of analogy between
the two, the poet refers to human laughter as equivalent to musical accompaniment
and wombs as dressing rooms. The ‘play of passion’ has finally been called ‘this
short comedy’ to suggest that life, after all, is not as serious a business as we take
it to be.

If we compare the poem of Sir Walter Raleigh given above with the following
poem by Emily Dickinson we will notice that, while in the former, metaphor has
been employed for merely noting of a likeness between life and a stage-play, the
latter uses the metaphor ‘Iron Horse’ for train as the central concept of the poem:

I like to see it lap the miles

And lick the Valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at Tanks;
And then prodigious step
Around a pile of mountains,
And supercilious peer
In Shanties by the sides of Roads;
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
And crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down Hill….
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 Imagery and Symbols
4.5 LANGUAGE AND DICTION
Before we get into the intricacies of rhythms and metrical structures, it is important
to understand what exactly is implied by the word ‘diction’. The choice a writer
makes of words and the particular style with which he uses them in his poetry is
what may be broadly termed diction. Let us first take a look at some of the
preliminary problems of diction that arise when we write verse.
For most of us, English is an acquired language a second language. It helps if
we are conscious of it, particularly when we lapse into using it like a library
language, stiffening the edges of our thinking with bookish words. We are not
totally relaxed in it. So keep a vigilant eye open for the lived experience that
words always stand for, by not just knowing or understanding a word, but by
feeling and experiencing it.
Lucidity and intelligibility are objectives to strive for in poetry as much as in
prose. Poetry in no way gives us a license to be obscure; so guard against unclear
lines of thought as also an impulse to indulge in complexities of expression that
may not be easy to handle initially. It is good to write a poem that is clear and
easy to understand, for it will win over many readers for you.
Speech indicates movement, flight, even a quickening of the mind, all of which
get somewhat congealed in writing. But when it comes to poetry, the language
may still bear all the directness of speech. English is a stress-based language
and a skilful use of this will lend phonic and rhythmic patterns to the language.
Words, otherwise familiar to us, take on an altered colour in poetry.
Words are the components of language and vocabulary is something that needs
to be built steadily and cumulatively over a period of time. There is a common
belief that the more one reads books the richer is one’s vocabulary. This, however,
is only a half-truth, for personal experience is invaluable. We learn new words as
we encounter new situations and experiences, and we begin to realize these words
more sharply than before. In a higher degree than prose, poetry exudes a strong,
personally-realized experience, brought about by ‘self’ (or the ‘I’) of the poet,
which gives an authenticity, if not reality, to the poem. But you may wonder
how within the span of a single life, one can experience all that life holds out for
us.
This brings us to the question of ‘surrogate experience’ or substitute experience,
a kind of ‘second-hand’ experience that calls for some training and imaginative
cultivation. You can learn to participate imaginatively in experiences that are
otherwise remote from everyday life. For instance, even areas such as yachting,
trekking, or abstract mental activities like philosophizing, bring with them a set
of words that belong exclusively to the domain of those experiences. You should
be able not merely to understand them but relate to them as well, although you
may be culturally remote from them.

4.5.1 Words in Poetry

Semantics (meaning) cannot give us absolute assurance over the intrinsic meaning
of words because they can be elusive and take on colours from the surrounding
words. Words denote when they indicate light meaning and connote when they 101
Modes of Creative Writing suggest a meaning in addition to the fundamental meaning implied by the word.
For example, the related words, ‘empty’, ‘blank;’ and ‘vacuous’ all denote varying
shades of vacancy, while the last word ‘vacuous’ also connotes inanity and
obtuseness. In the skilful hands of a poet, even denotative words can take on
additional dimensions and layered implications by the scent and smell they carry.
‘What do you mean?’ ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be….’. all too often in life, we
come across such statements that seem to hang indecisively in mid-air. This is a
problem that relates to meaning, because we always take words for granted and
expect them to transfer thoughts from one mind to another. In this context,
meaning could sometimes get distorted or even lost. An effective poet deepens
the levels of meaning and offers fresh insights. For, ultimately, what a poet
means in the parts is so crucial to the understanding of the poem as a whole that
even an intelligent reader will be put off by blurred meanings. Much of the
charge of obscurity commonly leveled against modern poetry, and of its being
‘difficult’ to understand, can probably be attributed to this sort of a failure in
conveying meaning.
Words have their own mortality and what is valid for one period fades in
significance for the subsequent periods. Besides, the use of anachronistic or
obsolete words would date you and it is a flaw not forgiven easily by the
discriminating reader. Words like ‘brethren’, ‘beware’ and ‘abide’ , alongwith a
host of other words, have outlived their utility and should therefore be avoided.
When in doubt, do consult a modern, updated dictionary which will give you a
clue about a word’s obsolescence.
Like archaisms, clichés are to be avoided too, for they really make for a tired
language that shows up a mind that is too lazy to think originally. It is difficult
now to eradicate clichés totally because mass media have unleashed a fresh torrent
of clichés and empty phrases.
Language involves storing the knowledge that comes with words. Like a bee
storing honey, one has to hive knowledge and put it away in a storehouse where
it will mature. We also acquire language as an inheritance, a kind of a legacy
and all it takes is a vigilant eye and ear for words, even those words that may not
be immediately put to use. What is important, particularly for poetry, is the
dynamic quality of language and the free play a poet gives to it, even within the
control of his discipline. Let us look at the tremendous force of these lines from
‘Leda and the Swan’ by W.B. Yeats:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bills
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast
How can those terrified, vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
Here the language explodes outward as the meaning struggles to free itself of the
102 fetters of words. What predominates the scene is a great sense of verbal force.
Language here reaches out almost like a gesture, tangibly felt, just as Blake’s Imagery and Symbols
poem ‘The Tiger’, in a very different way, transports the reader into a fearful
world of touch where he feels the sinewy power of a tiger.
Check Your Progress 2
i) What are the characteristics of good diction?
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(Check your answer with the one given at the end of this Unit.)

4.6 METRICAL STRUCTURES

4.6.1 Rhythm
While both poetry and prose call for an organization of thoughts, diction, mood,
emotions and tone, we find that this is more highly controlled in poetry. The use
of language in poetry involves putting sounds together to make a suggestive
sense. In prose, the sounds of words do not matter as much as their meanings.
That is why in prose a rhythm seems to occur almost like an accident. Moreover,
prose does not offer any measuring rod for its rhythmic units, if any. If the smooth
flow of well-written prose is comparable to easy walking, poetry can be compared
to marching to a set beat.
Poetry is undoubtedly a gift that could be cultivated. It calls for a certain training
and constant application as much as music and dancing do. For poetry, one needs
to train and sensitize one’s ears to the natural beat and resonance of a language
⎯ any language⎯ the natural rise and fall in human speech, the tonal nuances
that human emotions bring about. One has to acquire also a certain way of
perceiving or have the ability to perceive an otherwise mundane-looking reality
around us through images apparently diffuse and elusive, and, therefore, beyond
our control. Poetry helps to sharpen these impressions through various means,
including rhythm. Let’s first consider some of the elementary measures employed
with skill by poets to bring about the rhythmic movement that is so pleasurable
in poetry.
Although the term ‘rhythm’ is often quite loosely used in poetry, it presupposes
recurrence and regularity. Just as we tend to take the life around us for granted,
so also we tend to take for granted the dormant rhythms in language, and the beat
that is exclusive to that language. It is all there for us to grasp, but what happens
is that in our ordinary, day-to-day life, we are so used to making a functional use
of language that we look for such information from any kind of written discourse.
Prose discourse, naturally, offers a hardened kind of language while poetry takes
us away from our mechanical responses and removes the stale crust to establish
fresh connections between sound and meaning. In addition to this, poetry offers
a new experience, even discovery, if you will, and all this with a distinct auditory
pleasure difficult to ignore. The pleasure comes, too, from having participated
and shared with the poet the intended rhythm of the poem; ‘intended’, because 103
Modes of Creative Writing rhythm is a consciously, carefully undertaken selection of sounds calling for
great discipline on the part of the poet. Rhythm is of two kinds⎯rising rhythm
and falling rhythm.

4.6.2 Meter
Rhythmic patterns make a poem move onward and it is the function of meter to
effect this rhythm. As meter occurs in the course of our reading or reciting, let’s
call it an ‘event’. However, this even, by itself, may not register in our minds.
Only a repeated succession of these stimuli, like repeated pulses of energy, will
help us discern a regular rhythm.
Once it is established, it builds up a momentum of its own and the verse is impelled
onward by the force of this rhythm. A rhythm in this way creates an expectancy,
a metrical expectancy to be precise, and you gradually grow accustomed to the
syllabic runs and pauses and find yourself actively participating in the rhythmic
pattern of the poem. You also begin to recognize the rhythm as something that
contributes a tangible ‘body’ and ‘form’ to an otherwise abstract looking poem.
If verse is said to march, it must be marching with a measured or measurable
stride which, in prosody, is called ‘the foot’. Before we learn to measure the
foot, we need to distinguish the syllable which is the smallest unit of language.
Each syllable corresponds to a chest pulse which may be either weak or strong.
The relative strength of the chest pulse is responsible for the stressed and
unstressed syllables.
Four kinds of meter
These are the commonest metres in English verse. The analysis of metrical
patterns, is known as scansion. The fundamental unit, that is the foot, is composed
of one accented syllable in combination with (usually)one (or more) unaccented
syllables. A typical example in English verse would be: ‘Is this/the face/that
launched/a thous/sand ships?’ This particular line is in iambic pentameter because
it is composed of five iambic feet, each iamb being a metrical foot consisting of
an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable.
Other types of feet are:
Anapaest, which is composed of two unaccented syllables followed by an
accented syllable
The word, anapaest, itself is used to give the impression of swiftness, and even
of action as in the following line:
‘With a leap/and a bound/the swift/anapaests throng’ (Coleridge)
Trochee, which has one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable
as in hardly Dactyl which has one accented syllable followed by two unaccented
syllables, as in merrily.

4.7 INNOVATIONS
In the 20th and 21st centuries there has been a great deal of experimentation in
104 poetry as well as in music and in the other arts. It is a reflection of the revolutionary
discoveries and new ways of thinking and looking at our world. From Freud’s Imagery and Symbols

and Jung’s discoveries, scientific discoveries and explorations of the most startling
kind, technological innovations that changed the dimensions and possibilities of
our physical universe, the impinging of Hindu and Buddhist thought and
consciousness, the sense of doom created by the threat of nuclear war, experienced
in limited but horrifying form by the inhabitants of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the
feminist revolution⎯all these have been unprecedented developments in our
time. These have had the effect of making artists and writers seek new forms,
new ways of stimulating their vision and the fragmentation to which they have
been subjected by them. They have advocated the use of ‘the subjective image’
(an image drawn from the unconscious which defies logic). In painting, the
work of Picasso spelt a new way of seeing things⎯shape, form, light, objects,
figures ⎯ that led to a new kind of expression. Cubism, and later Surrealism
(whose most influential exponent was Salvador Dali), also had an enormous
influence on literature.
One of the first expressions of this new, ‘liberated’ way of seeing was the tendency
to reject traditional, classical verse forms and metrical patterns. Poets began to
write Free Verse. They have now come to rely on ‘natural speech rhythms, of
stressed and unstressed syllables’, instead of any regular meter or line-length.
Along with Free Verse, many other experiments were attempted. The poets have
even stopped using formal punctuation and capital letters at the beginning of a
line or a new verse paragraph. One of the poets who became famous for this
kind of writing was the American poet, E.E. Cummings, who always signed
himself e..e cummings. He died in 1962, but his influence has been considerable.
Consider the following lines:
My father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am; through have to give….
Even their grammar and sentence-construction seem strange. Yet, somehow, we
understand the poet’s meaning. He makes us share his fresh, ecstatic, lyrical,
song-like language. Cummmings and some other poets feel that punctuation and
capital letters give only formal importance to a line or a word.
An Indian poet who drops formal punctuation, so as to reinforce the hypnotic
and incantary quality of his experience and expression, is Arun Kolatkar, who
writes in both Marathi and English. In a poem called ‘The Boatride’, he makes
us see the smallest details with heightened perception, and creates a hypnotic
quality in which the seer sees more rather than less. Consider the following
lines:
two sisters
that came
last
when the boat
nearly started
seated side
by side
athwart 105
Modes of Creative Writing on a plank
have not
spoken
hands in lap
they have
been looking
past the boatman’s
profile.
splicing
the wrinkles
of his saline
face
and loose ends
of the sea.
You would have here noticed the absence of punctuation, capital letters, rhyme
schemes, etc. Kolatkar avoids them to express his own inner compulsions and
his unique vision, which is surrealistic⎯ a term signifying an attempt in art and
literature ‘to express the workings of the unconscious mind’ and in which
imagination and reality are fused, in which contradictions in logic are acceptable
to the imagination, ordinary concepts of time and space do not operate, and
everything is seen with an innocent eye. This kind of innovativeness which
springs from inner need is genuine. It is not an attempt to attract attention or be
different, but is a genuine way of seeing, feeling and being different.
Poems now simultaneously disclose and conceal their meanings. Some poets
have experimented with ‘the decomposition or breaking up of language, the
dismantling of normal syntax and word usage, so as to create a new language
field’. In a way, you may say that life is like this, with all sorts of different things
going on at the same time, and coming together, or separating.

4.8 SUMMING UP
In this Unit we’ve spoken about the importance of using symbols and images to
enhance the poetic effect. We’ve also spoken about metrical structures and how
innovations in poetry are experimenting with form and content of poetry.

4.9 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
i) The images are often conveyed by symbols, similes and metaphors which
have the effect of enlarging their meaning and significance.
Check Your Progress 2
i) Diction is personal, therefore, it varies from person to person. But good
diction implies appropriateness and the avoidance of clichés and archaisms.
106 It also uses metaphors and symbols for effective poetry writing.