English 140
Summer 2008
Introduction
to Poetry
Professor
Richter
Assignment 1:
Imagery
Your
assignment is to write an essay on the imagery of a selected poem.
Imagery, you
will remember, is at its most basic level an appeal to the senses, usually the
visual sense, but often to hearing, smell or touch as well. This imagery, in the second place, can be
used to create metaphors or symbols by which the poet gives expression to his
or her thoughts, attitudes and feelings.
Patterns of imagery, finally, can be used by the poet to comment on the
experience s/he is presenting.
As before,
you may select any poem which appeals to you from the text, so long as it has
sufficient complexity of imagery to make it worth writing about. But you may want to avoid a long hunt and
look at some of the following poems contained in your anthology:
Andrew
Marvell: "The Garden"
John Keats:
"To Autumn"
Alfred, Lord
Tennyson: "Tears, Idle Tears"
Robert Frost:
"Birches"
Countee
Cullen: “Heritage”
e.e. cummings: “all in green went my love
riding”
Dylan Thomas:
"Fern Hill"
A.R. Ammons:
"Corsons Inlet"
Adrienne
Rich:”Diving into the Wreck”
You need not
re-type the poem, but you should quote from it, as you will need to do to make
your points.
What follows
is a model of the sort of paper you might want to do, by a former student,
Diane Lehrenbaum. You will observe that
this paper has a thesis, announced in the first paragraph, develops the thesis
through a dozen or so paragraphs of argument, and presents her conclusion. If you are not used to quoting poetry in your
papers, and it is unlikely that many of you are, note the way Diane did it:
short quotations are placed within the paragraph, with a slash separating the
lines; chunks four lines and over are typed out just as in the source, but
indented five spaces. The poem on which
it is written is in your present texts, but I have typed it out for you anyway.
Papers are
due Monday, June 16th. Suggested length: 1000 words.
“The Stolen
Child” by William
Where dips
the rocky highland
Of Sleuth
Wood in the lake,
There lies a
leafy island
Where
flapping herons wake
The drowsy
water rats;
There we've
hid our faery vats,
Full of
berries
And
of reddest stolen cherries.
Come
away, O human child!
To
the waters and the wild
With
a faery, hand in hand,
For
the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the
wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray
sands with light,
Far off by
furthest Rosses
We foot it
all the night,
Weaving olden
dances
Mingling
hands and mingling glances
Till the moon
has taken flight;
To and fro we
leap
And chase the
frothy bubbles,
While the
world is full of troubles
And
is anxious in its sleep.
Come
away, O human child!
To
the waters and the wild
With
a faery, hand in hand,
For
the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the
wandering water gushes
From the
hills above Glen-Car,
In pools
among the rushes
That scarce
could bathe a star,
We seek for
slumbering trout,
And
whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet
dreams
Leaning
softly out
From ferns
that drop their tears
Over
the young streams.
Come
away, O human child!
To
the waters and the wild
With
a faery, hand in hand,
For
the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us
he's going,
The
solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no
more the lowing
Of the calves
on the warm hillside
Or the kettle
on the hob
Sing peace
into his breast,
Or see the
brown mice bob
Round and
round the oatmeal chest
For
he comes, the human child,
To
the waters and the wild
With
a faery, hand in hand,
From
a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE IMAGERY IN "THE
STOLEN CHILD"
The imagery
in "The Stolen Child," by W.B. Yeats, depicts a conflict between the
attractions of
fairlyland and those of the human world. The poem describes the enticement of a human
child
"from a world more full of weeping than he can
understand" to the "waters and the wild" of
fairyland.
The child is lured to the supernatural world by its promise of mystery and
adven-
ture, because he cannot understand why the
human world is so full of sorrow and unhappiness.
However, by
the end of the poem the reader may wonder whether the child will really be
content in fairyland.
Fairyland is
a beautiful, carefree place:
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats.
In this
description we notice, first, that the "rocky highland," which may be
a metaphor for the
human world, appears in sharp contrast to a
much more attractive place, the leafy island.
On
this island, the first action described is
that of flapping herons waking drowsy water rats, and
we note that the poet uses the word
"drowsy," not "sleepy."
Drowsiness may imply laziness or
freedom from care.
More
appealing to a child, perhaps, than beauty or carefreeness, are the fun and
mischief in
fairyland.
On the fairy island are hidden "faery vats,/
Full of berries / And of reddest stolen
cherries."
The vats are full, not only of berries, which a child finds fun to eat,
but they also
contain the "reddest stolen
cherries." The fact that they were
stolen implies that some mischief
was involved.
Yeats
describes more fun and mischief in fairyland. The fairies "Foot it all the
night,/ Weaving
olden dances," until the "moon has
taken flight." They also
"chase the frothy bubbles" and "seek
for slumbering trout," in order to
whisper in "their ears" and give them "unquiet
dreams." What
child would not want to stay up all night
dancing and chasing around; what child would not
find a certain mischievous pleasure in
disturbing the slumber of some quiet creature?
Indeed,
many adults might wish to do the same.
In fact, the
human, that is, the adult world is not at all attractive to a child interested
in fun
and mischief. As mentioned earlier, the human world is
"rocky," not easy to live in.
It is "full
of troubles / And is anxious in its
sleep," and also "full of weeping." Therefore, we can see
why a child would be attracted to a
fairyland where fun and prettiness and adventure prevail.
However,
fairyland's attractions may not seem so appealing when looked at more
closely. First
of all, a leafy island may be beautiful,
but the word "leafy" calls to mind an image of waving,
fleeting impressions; that is to say, a leafy
island is chimerical. Secondly, the
drowsiness of the
water rats and the slumber of the trout may
suggest freedom from care, but they may also
suggest boredom; and at the same time, we must
note that the water rats are wakened rudely by
noisy flapping herons, while the slumber of
the trout is also disturbed. Perhaps
there is no real
rest in fairyland; and if there is no real
rest, perhaps there is no peace at all.
Yeats uses
other images which suggest that the supernatural world might not be as
wonderful as
it seems:
Where the wave of midnight glosses
The dim gray sands with light
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night.
The images in
these lines indicate the superficiality of fairyland. "Gray sands" are rather dull,
if not actually dirty. However, the moonlight glosses the sands with
what we may presume to
be white, clear light; yet the word
"glosses" implies a superficial coating. The sands have no
character of their own. We might add to this the
observation that white light can be cold.
The image of
superficiality and coldness recurs in the poem in the description of
"pools among
the rushes / That scarce could bathe a
star." Stars shed a cold light and
are distant, while a
pool that cannot bathe a star--that is,
provide a full reflection-- must be shallow.
Perhaps we
can infer that this is what fairyland is
like: shallow, distant and cold.
These
impressions are reinforced by other images in the poem that suggest a lack of
genuine
contact among the inhabitants of fairyland:
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles.
It was noted
above that dancing all night is fun; but "mingling" is not as
fulfilling to humans as,
say, sharing or exchanging. Then, immediately after this mingling, the
fairies are seen chasing
frothy bubbles.
Frothy bubbles, while pretty, are an excellent image of something
transitory
and intangible.
By contrast,
the human world described by Yeats seems quite real, warm, and welcoming, in
spite of its troubles and cares. It offers real sustenance. Humans cannot live solely on the
berries and cherries of fairyland, but need the
"oatmeal" of the human world--real food. And
the "kettle on the hob / Sing[s] peace
into his breast," as opposed to the unquiet dreams of fairy-
land.
The hillside is described as warm, in contrast to the implied coldness
of fairyland.
Even the
animals in the human world are friendlier than the flapping herons in
fairyland: calves
live on the warm hillside, and "brown
mice bob / Round and round the oatmeal chest." Chil-
dren seem to have an affinity for calves, and
they think of brown mice as cute and playful.
One cannot be
friends with drowsy water rats and slumbering trout. And calves and brown
mice are warm creatures, while the animals in
fairyland are cold-blooded.
To summarize,
we have seen that the imagery in Yeats's poem makes it clear that although
fairyland is fun, pretty and full of mischief, it
is also cold and insubstantial; and that although
the human world is sad, troubled and
anxious, it is also warm, substantial and friendly. Al-
though Yeats's poem seems at first reading to
weight the balance in favor of fairyland, his
poem, like fairyland itself, is
seductive. Only when we delve beneath
the surface does it
become possible to adjust our values and
separate reality from fantasy.