The Craft of Poetry
One of the features that distinguishes poetry from other genres of literature is the way it exploits the musical
potential of language. Not only do poets play with the meanings of words, they play with the sounds of words,
taking advantage of the fact that hearing something expressed can be as pleasant as thinking about it.
The poet, in that sense, is sometimes very much a musician, making a rhyming, rhythmic kind of music with
words, sometimes playing off the way they sound to complement what they mean. When sound and sense
complement one another -- when it seems the sound of a poem reinforces its meaning in some way -- the effect
is usually striking.
Although we could spend several semesters discussing the art of poetry in all is forms and through all its long
history, we can gain a preliminary understanding quickly by getting familiar with the two basic elements that
begin to distinguish a poem's craft:
1.
2.
3.
The way it uses WORDS to create literal and figurative IMAGES.
The way it produces SOUND, creatively arranging words in LINES and STANZAS, exploiting a
language's musical potential.
The way it manipulates STRUCTURE, making use of open and closed forms.
The Craft of Poetry: Imagery
"What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane
them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimlyrealized truth I must try to reach and realize." -Dylan Thomas
A poet is using words more consciously than any other kind of writer. Aiming to stir readers' imaginations,
poets exploit the power of words to evoke thoughts, feelings, reflections in ways that are sometimes very
direct, sometimes very indirect. A poet always picks and chooses words that are just right. Most finished poem
are very deliberate products, not something casually tossed off half drunk at 3am, but something lovingly
studied and toiled over. Even the spontaneous prose of the American Beat poets of the 50s and 60s was the
product of artists who were very deliberate in their methods. Poetry is almost never approximate. So you
know, when you read a poem, that each word was selected carefully for one of many reasons, and that if you
analyze it carefully, it will open up.
Poetry works it magic by the way it uses words to evoke "images" that convey a lot of meaning once you look
into them. Sometimes a whole poem is that quick image, like "You Fit Into Me" (p. 667) by Margaret
Atwood (further discussion of this poem will follow below). Other examples of brief poems that are simple,
quick, loaded images are Ezra Pound's "In A Station at the Metro" (p. 661) and Taniguchi Buson's "The
Piercing Chill I Feel" (in the catalogue). What is an "image"?
An image in poetry refers to the words or the language a writer uses to convey a concrete mental impression,
which may be visual, creating a "picture" in the reader's imagination, or sensory in other ways. An image can
appear by the stroke of a single word, in the rush of a phrase, in a line or a group of lines; it may even be the
entirety of a short poem. Wherever you find it, keep in mind that every image a poet conjures in our
imaginations has been placed there by word choices. Some poets are ingenious at crafting rich, vivid images
that use very few words to say so much. They have an uncanny knack for choosing just the right word or
words.
Images can be further defined by splitting them into two broad categories: literal and figurative. A literal image
is a mental impression created by direct description. Literal images arise out of a writer's use of concrete,
specific, sensory words to directly describe something, someone, some feeling, some vision, or some
experience. Literal imagery places you right there in the scene; you feel as if you have entered the world the
poem has created. A figurative image is a mental impression created by indirect description, or what are
known as "figures of speech." Figurative language (the use of figures of speech) is key in poetry, as we'll see in
detail later. Figurative images, to begin with, can be understood as those that describe something by
comparing it to something else. Metaphor, simile, and personification fit into this category.
Virtually every poem existing will make use of at least one of these kinds of imagery.
LITERAL IMAGERY
Poets are using literal imagery when they make word choices that are very direct, very concrete, specific, and
sensory, inviting readers to imaginatively envision something clearly and distinctly.
A brutally direct poem that's very powerful is Ntozake Shange's poem, "With No Immediate Cause" (in the
catalogue). In this poem, Shange uses more than one method to get readers to pay attention. She uses
repetition, and she uses a kind of shorthand, familiar diction to draw us in, get us to feel the speaker's rising
fear and rage--her outrage--and another way she gets us involved is by using language that is increasingly
concrete and specific, vivid, and direct. The poem willfully, consciously, and with purpose chooses language
designed to upset and shock us.
The poem begins with the bland kind of language we're used to hearing in news reports, or buried in a news
article about a recent crime--and that's what the speaker is reading on the subway, a news report: "every 3
minutes a woman is beaten/every five minutes a woman is raped/every ten minutes a lil girl is
molested/yet…" We're apt to pass over these statistics, though, because numbers alone don't make us feel. I
believe that is one way to read the meaning of the otherwise puzzling "yet" that appears next. There may be
other ways to read it as well. Suppose, though, it's that the speaker knows that these numbers alone aren't
really enough to get anyone's attention. We just say, "Oh well," and go on with our lives. But the point of the
poem is to force us to focus on the horror of those numbers, to feel something about the problem (to "make the
stomach believe" maybe, ala Tim O'Brien in "How to Tell A True War Story"). Maybe the speaker senses that
most of the people on that bus (which maybe represent most of society, say) don't really want to think about
problems like this one; they want to deny their responsibility--whether they're directly guilty, or guilty of
ignoring the problem. The poem, in my mind, becomes a kind of plea for people to take the problem of
violence against women seriously. To achieve this, Shange has decided to employ very graphic, disturbing
language to wake us up out of our comfortable complacency.
As the speaker begins to imagine the implications of the statistics she's read, she gets more and more graphic,
imagining the worst. We're inside her head as she grows more and more agitated--the poem presents her point
of view. These numbers have made her look around at the world in a different, paranoid light. Notice how her
language gets more and more intense as she associates the statistics in the news article and begins to
graphically imagine what their real-life implications might mean. She imagines such despicable horrors (once
again, based on news stories) that she ends up completely disheveled: "i spit up i vomit i am screaming" and
even imagines herself taking revenge, imagining what she'd say to the "authorities," presumably after being
arrested for fighting back. Do you think she really goes home and attacks someone?
On one level the poem is a graphic representation of what's in one woman's mind as she reads an ordinary
news report about abuse and rape--but because the poem is so detailed, so heightened, capturing a voice and a
moment so dramatically, we can also discover other things. Maybe it's a poem about paranoia, about being
afraid to ride the subway. Or it could be a poem about how the media sensationalizes violence, and the effects
of that. Or it could be a poem about a woman who's about to snap, and why.
"Those Winter Sundays" (p. 565) is another strong example of how a writer employs concrete, specific,
sensory description to create literal images for readers to imaginatively conjure.
At the beginning of "Those Winter Sundays" the speaker is thinking back to the coldness of his childhood. He
remembers the cold in literal as well as figurative terms. First he focuses on the Sundays when his father would
wake up early and get the fire going before waking the rest of the household. But the poem is really about how
the speaker rues the fact that, growing up, he never really understood the meaning of his father's actions--how
they were the way he expressed his love for the family, for the speaker.
The concrete, specific words in the poem show that the speaker does finally appreciate how his father gave of
himself to keep the family going. He now recognizes that "Sundays too" his father would forfeit his wellearned rest and wake up in the "blueblack cold" to start the fire. The fact that the father gets up early on
Sunday is significant, because this should be his day to sleep late, having labored all week, but he sacrifices
that for the family. The "blueblack cold" suggests the very early hour and the bitterness of the cold. It sounds
painfully cold, like a black-and-blue bruise. His "cracked hands" suggest that he's a hard-working man, that
he's worked a long time. He might be old, or getting old, or getting old before he's old. That's something the
speaker might not have realized as a young boy, but that he can appreciate now. The "blazing" fire that the
father creates represents the warmth that he literally brings to the house, despite his inability to bring any
personal warmth into it. As the boy hears him prepare the fire, he hears the "cold splintering, breaking" and
may be intimidated by the sound; he stays huddled in bed listening, and doesn't consider getting up to help.
He's hiding, it seems. He might be afraid of the "breaking" sound of the wood, associating it with the "chronic
anger" that rules the house, which is mentioned a few lines later. When he hears his father call, he gets up, but
reluctantly, in fear. To the boy, the blazing fire doesn't signify warmth, but anger, maybe his father's anger.
But by the end of the poem we realize the speaker understands more as an adult than he did as a boy. He now
realizes that his father has "driven out the cold," which sounds like he understands that his father was fighting
the cold, making an effort to defeat it. That he "drives" out the cold sounds like he's protecting the family from
an invader or a thief. And he understands now that the act of polishing his good shoes was his way of taking
pride in the little they had. The speaker ends the poem on a note of self-incrimination: "What did I know, what
did I know / Of love's austere and lonely offices?" That he repeats that penultimate line seems to signify his
frustration with himself for not seeing more deeply into his father's true feelings. And very tellingly, his choice
of the words "austere" and "lonely offices" show how his understanding has matured. He now understands
that his father took caring for the family very seriously -- that he saw it as grim, "austere" work, but that he was
willing to make the necessary sacrifices to accomplish it. And he understands, now, that his father expressed
his love by tirelessly meeting those grim, inconvenient obligations, those duties, even on those bitterly cold
winter Sundays. Maybe every day was as tough as a bitterly cold winter Sunday to this man. But he went on
anyway--he never abandoned his obligations. And now the child--perhaps he's a parent himself now-understands.
Many poems operate in this way, giving us a direct, vivid experience to contemplate. Another one to consider
is "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (p. 654), written by WWI veteran, Wilfred Owen, who died in 1918, the very year
he wrote this poem, at age 25. The title of his famous anti-war poem is a portion of an old Latin saying, very
popular on military gravestones: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." Translated, it means, "how sweet and
fitting it is to die for one's country." The poem's images, some of them literal, some of them figurative, build to
a crescendo in support of its assertion at the end, that it's a horrible, devastating lie that's been sold to children
"ardent for some desperate glory": the idea that dying in battle is glorious, or sweet, or fitting--or anything but
the horror that the speaker's first hand account recalls.
FIGURATIVE IMAGERY: Metaphor, Simile, and Personification
"Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. Images in
verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground,
prose--a train which delivers you at a destination." -T.E. Hulme
"What is metaphor, and how does it differ from both literal and other forms of figurative utterances? Why do we use expressions
metaphorically instead of saying exactly and literally what we mean? How do metaphorical utterances work, that is, how is it possible for
speakers to communicate to hearers when speaking metaphorically inasmuch as they do not say what they mean? And why do some
metaphors work and others do not?" -John R. Searle
So many poets use language that's rich in the sense that it leaves a lot open to the reader's imagination, giving
readers full play in interpreting. A common technique is to use figurative language--figures like metaphor,
simile, and personification abound in all kinds of poetry.
METAPHOR AND SIMILE
A metaphor is an implicit comparison while a simile is an explicit comparison. Poets use similes and
metaphors frequently in powerful ways. The unique language of poetry is very much a language of metaphor
and simile.
"You Fit Into Me" (p. 667) by Margaret Atwood is a brief little thing, but as you read into it, more and more
meaning emerges from the one simple comparison she's drawing. You've hooked me but the attachment is
painful, fatal maybe. The fact that the "you" (the other) is inside the "me" (the speaker) may represent an
invasion, maybe a sexual invasion, maybe an emotional, psychological one. Maybe this relationship has really
screwed this speaker up, has really hurt her. (I'll call the speaker a "her" for convenience, but notice the gender
isn't specified--this could go either way.) The fact that the hook is going into they "eye" may be significant, too.
The pain goes right to the soul (the eye often represents a person's soul). And there's that play on "eye" versus
"I." If you read the last line "an open I" it still makes sense. In a relationship you usually make yourself pretty
vulnerable but that's the risk. To make any kind of deep relationship work, you have to open yourself up.
Maybe the speaker went into this relationship with her eyes open but she got hurt anyway. There's just all
kinds of ways to read into this. It's a beautiful little nut of a poem.
Another poem that works its magic figuratively is Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son" (p. 886). In this poem
the speaker is a mother talking to her son; that much we know from the title. Why is she giving this talk to her
son--that's an interesting question open to interpretation. What is she telling her son? This isn't a dry lecture
about the value of determination and hard work. She's trying to get through to his imagination, trying to
inspire him. She wants him to know she's been there and that even if she hasn't "made it," she's not giving up.
An interesting question to ask yourself might be: what do you think the mother is hoping the son will strive
for? What's the reward at the top of the stairs? Material success? Spiritual peace? What do you think? As you
think about this poem, you may find yourself contrasting this mother's soft, loving voice with the one we heard
in "Girl."
N. Scott Momaday's poem "A Simile" (handout) is another example of a poem working figuratively. This
time the image is of two people, a couple, behaving "as the deer." What does the speaker gain from making
this comparison? We can picture those frightened, self-absorbed deer walking single file, ready to fly away at
the first sign of threat. The speaker is a little bewildered as to why he and his lover (wife?) are no longer
intimate, but have become distrustful of one another. The image of the deer is an interesting portrait of how he
thinks they're behaving, but it's not how he thinks a relationship should be. Rather than walk in "single file" a
couple should be beside one another--and you could explore all of the connotations of what that might mean.
What does it mean to walk beside one another? To be equal maybe, to be friends. One should not hold his or
her "head high"--what might that mean? To be snooty, arrogant, self-righteous, maybe. What might it mean to
hold one's "ears forward/ with eyes watchful"? Maybe that suggests always being on the alert, always ready to
take offense--always insecure, and never able to extend any benefit of the doubt. It's easy to misinterpret
another's words and actions. If we're always on guard like that, maybe we're more likely to take something the
wrong way--and be hurt by something that wasn't intended to be hurtful. The hooves ready to take flight…you
can't work things out if you're always too afraid to face things, if you're always ready to run away. The image
of the dear is very suggestive and open to individual readers' interpretations.
A funny (but still kind of serious) poem that works figuratively is Marge Piercy's "The Secretary Chant"
(remember that one from chapter 19, p. 564). This poem uses metaphor throughout to humorously get the
message out there that this worker (a woman), in this job, feels dehumanized, reduced to a function. Every
portion of her body is objectified--she's the desk, the paper clips, the rubber bands, mimeograph ink, casters.
Her head goes "buzz and click" and she's like a disorganized file. She's aware that those around her assume she
has no intellect to speak of; to them, her mind is all buzz, all click, a crackled, crossed switchboard. She's
nothing but machine, spitting out various kinds of paper. To her boss, perhaps, she feels she is no more than
the sum of all of the objects which surround her, and which she manages. Although the speaker characterizes
herself the way she feels she's been characterized by others, we're aware, I think, that really she's satirizing the
way she's been characterized. In the end she purposely, sarcastically misspells "wonce" to jab at those who've
dehumanized and devalued her. Maybe the machine is breaking down?
One more poem we can look at that exemplifies the way poems sometimes employ extended metaphor is
Robert Francis's "Catch" (p. 570). Baseball lovers will have an easy time relating to the kind of "catch" the
two boys are having. The poet uses this easy familiarity to make something potentially difficult to understand a
bit easier to envision: reading (or writing, or understanding) a poem is a little like having a game of catch. The
balls come at you every which way--there's no telling how the writer will lob those words at you. But the
words are expressive ("attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes") and the poet uses "anything to outwit the
prosy," making readers "scramble to pick up the meaning." But the reward is that satisfying feel, that great
sound the ball makes in your glove, the way a reader's mind clicks when he gets that "pretty one plump in his
hands."
Many poets have tried to use poetry to explore, like "Catch," what a poem is, or at least what it does. Another
famous poem along those lines which also relies heavily on simile is Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica"
(handout). To unwrap or unpack this poem, explore the implications of all the many comparisons the speaker
makes. The poem's similes help us by comparing that which is familiar to that which is strange, and by
comparing things that are solid and concrete to that which is conceptual and abstract. Hopefully, as a result,
we end up with a more vivid understanding of what poetry is, how it operates.
PERSONIFICATION
Personification is another figure of speech that poets employ freely when it suits them, sometimes in a quick
image, sometimes throughout an entire poem. When you invest animals or other non-human things with
human characteristics or emotions, you're "personifying" them. The point might be to "give the world life and
motion" (as your textbook's glossary explains) or it might be to make some kind of sublime connection to that
world. It might even be the Buddhist precept "Thou art that" given poetic expression.
Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "The Panther" (p. 656) is a powerful example of extended personification.
Throughout the poem, the panther is invested with human feeling. Is it that the speaker, observing the caged
panther, identifies with the pain of his imprisonment? Is it that the panther is able to communicate his pain,
breaking across the boundaries that separate our species, and the speaker is sensitive to the panther's pain? As
the poem opens, the speaker tells us that the pather's vision has "grown so weary" that his eyes seem blank,
they "can't hold anything else." But does the speaker really know what the panther sees or if he's weary? He
takes further liberties in the third line, announcing that "It seems to him there are/ a thousand bars; and
behind the bars, no world." Does the speaker really know what the panther is thinking here? What gives him
liberty to assume that this is what the panther is thinking? He's projecting his human feelings upon the panther
because he identifies with it. Once we accept that projection, once we suspend our disbelief, a powerful story
emerges. From within that cruel cage--which might represent any sort of loss of freedom--the world disappears;
any normal vision, normal behavior, is suspended and actions are mere motions, with no force of will behind
them. Life becomes "going through the motions." Free will is paralyzed--there's no action but empty ritual.
What happens next is that unasked for but inevitable glimpse of freedom, that whisper of possibility as the
"curtain of the pupils/ lifts, quietly." It's not a real possibility of freedom because the bars haven't disappeared.
The bars are still there. But the "image enters in." It's almost to painful to imagine. The glimpse of freedom
tears through every muscle, plunging into the heart (like a knife?), leaving the poor creature (the panther, us?)
to suffer. Even if you read the poem literally and aren’t interested in pursuing other levels of meaning (what
might the panther symbolize, and so on), it’s an incredibly sad portrait. It’s precisely the reason why I can’t
have a good time visiting zoos. I know they do a lot of good work. But the sight of all those caged creatures!!!
My reaction is always very much like the boy’s in “Axolotl.” If I allow my fascination to draw me in I become
guilt-ridden and horrified; it’s as if I’m trapped in there with them. I’ll never forget a certain grizzly bear at the
St. Louis Zoo in Forest Park (I used to live across the street from it, and went there often when my daughter
was stroller-bound)…I still remember the disturbing way it used to pace endlessly in that “ritual dance around
a center,” which Rilke describes so brilliantly, unable to go anywhere or do anything which would make it feel
like a real bear with real purpose and a real will. It was so obviously in misery, like this panther. On the other
hand, the polar bears a few hundred feet away were pretty cheerful, usually playing with their big red rubber
ball, splashing in their pool, rolling around. If you wanted to leave in anything like a good mood, you would
check in on them and walk very quickly past the grizzly bear, trying not to look.
In "Mirror" (p.676) the speaker is an object, a mirror. So we definitely have to suspend our disbelief! But
when we do, the poem really works. In the first stanza, the mirror is in someone's house--the woman who's
mentioned in the second stanza, we can suppose. The voice of the mirror is cold, mechanical. It's "silver and
exact"--it has a kind of steely precision to it that feels very inhuman (which is paradoxical, since it's being given
a human voice!). But it's not very human at all, swallowing whatever it sees, being truthful no matter what the
effect of its truthtelling. I'm kind of reminded here of the "mirror-mirror-on-the-wall" from the Sleeping Beauty
fairytale. This mirror is going to tell this woman she's not the fairest of them all and isn't going to worry how
that'll make her feel. There's no worry over seeming to be cruel. Honesty trumps kindness here. That's a little
inhuman, I think. Although we could discuss that. It's really something of an ethical dilemma. Suppose you
were this woman's mirror, in a figurative sense, and she asks you how she "looks." If she looks terrible, will
you tell her that truthfully? What would make you tell her truthfully? Well, this mirror decides that it's going to
be honest no matter what, truthful no matter way. It's the "eye of a little god" (which suggests omnipotence,
omnipresence), so the image it reflects, its cruel truthtelling, its nasty but honest reflection follows the woman
around whether she's in front of the mirror or not. Maybe the memory of what she sees there haunts her. But
we get the idea that she keeps coming back for confirmation. The second stanza continues in the same mode.
The mirror is more organic, but the effect is the same. This time we're at a lake, and we're recalling the
Narcissus myth. Should she be searching her reflection for "what she really is"? Maybe that's where she goes
wrong. Because the effect is the same. No lying, just the same unflattering reflection. Wrinkles around the
eyes, whatever…. The woman is so disturbed by the image of her own face that she breaks down in tears,
drowning the younger self she no longer can find in a sea of tears. And every day, the old woman peers back at
her, like a "terrible fish" (a powerful employment of simile in the last line).
MORE FIGURATIVE IMAGERY: Synecdoche, Metonymy, Apostrophe, Hyperbole
Synechdoche, says your textbook (p. 670), is a figure of speech in which part of something is used to signify
the whole. In "The Hand That Signed the Paper" (p. 671) Dylan Thomas focuses our attention on the hand of
the ruler, his five "sovereign fingers," instead of the whole person. We come to see how this "hand" represents
his imperial power--and how such a hand "rules pity as a hand rules heaven; hands have no tears to flow." The
detached power with which the ruler. The hand has no pity, no feelings; it's detached from the heart, and
cannot feel the horrible consequences of its actions. The pen which signs the paper is perhaps not mightier
than the sword; it is the sword.
Metonymy (p. 670) is a closely related figure of speech in which some thing or some quality closely associated
with the subject is substituted for it. In "The Hand That Signed the Paper" you see metonymy used when in the
second stanza, the speaker notes that "A goose's quill has put an end to murder / That put an end to talk." The
goose quill is something closely associated with the ruler's power to put his signature to the service of war and
murder.
These figures, as Myers points out, help us understand, and feel, how the ruler's power is detached from
ordinary empathy, sympathy, and pity--how it's inhuman, distant, remote from all human feeling.
Apostrophe is a figure poets use to allow the speaker to address an absent audience or an audience that's not
human and can't understand. It's really a way for the poet to allow the speaker to "think aloud," (p. 672)
expressing thoughts in a organized, formal way, as if addressing some specific listener. In the past, poets used
apostrophe to signal reflections that involved extreme or intense emotion, but writers today feel that
apostrophe can be too melodramatic, exaggerated, or "theatrical" (p. 672). Today, writers are more likely to
use it in a "half-serious" way, as in "To A Wasp" (p. 672). In that poem, a simple event--a wasp flies into the
speaker's kitchen and lands in her cake batter--becomes the occasion of a mock serious question in the last two
lines: "Did you not see / rising out of cumulus clouds / That fist aimed at both of us?"
This last line is not only "apostrophe" but hyperbole (p. 673). The cosmic "fist" (a synecdoche, presumably, for
God) finding time and cause, amidst all the serious struggles and suffering in the world, to take aim at a
woman baking a cake and one tiny wasp is pretty exaggerated. Writers use hyperbole, or exaggeration, to "add
emphasis without intending to be literally true" (p. 673). Meyers points to one of the great examples of
hyperbole, the seductive opening to Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress" (p. 624).
Understatement is the opposite of hyperbole. In this figure of speech, the speaker says less than intended, to
the effect that the point is, once again, somehow made more emphatically.
Oxymoron (p. 673) is "a condensed form of paradox in which two contradictory words are used together.
Poets use it because it "arrests a reader's attention by its seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense" (p. 673),
and once we figure it out, we're not likely to forget it. In Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good
Night" (p. 758) he introduces an oxymoron in the final stanza: "And you, my father, there on the sad height, /
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray." How can the tears be a curse and a blessing at the same
time? Paradoxically, they can. They are a curse because they are evidence of pain and suffering, but they'd be a
blessing because they'd be evidence that the speaker's father is putting up a fight. And they are real evidence of
love, in a strange way--they signify the ill man's pain at leaving his loved ones, his own sense of loss, and so
they help the speaker feel loved.
Allusion is not exactly a "figure of speech" but it uses language in a particular way that will extend meaning in
much the same way that figurative language does. Allusions are "brief references to a person, place, thing,
even, or idea in history or literature....They imply reading and cultural experiences shared by the writer and
reader, functioning as a kind of shorthand whereby the recalling of something outside the work supplies an
emotional or intellectual context..." (Glossary, CBIL.). Allusion can be found in poems as different as "Mirror"
by Sylvia Plath and "Hazel Tells Laverne" (p. 620) by Katharyn Howd Machan. In each case the poet is
amplifying meaning by making careful references readers will hopefully recognize.
Symbol is another device poets can use to extend meaning. When you can understand the meaning of a word
or passage in more than one way, the poet is probably using words symbolically. "Stopping by Woods on A
Snowy Evening" or another Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" gain force when you consider the
possibility that some of the words in those poems are used symbolically. Any image in a poem can take on
symbolic meaning, and even the most universal symbols can be used unique ways.
***
Specific, concrete, figurative, symbolic, connotative language is what packs a poem so tightly, what wraps it in
that neat package. The poet's skill with figurative language makes of poetry an art of compression. It's truly
amazing how much poets manage to say with the few words they choose.