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44SECTION 1 ESSAYS ON LITERARY TOPICS
Natalia Matveeva Ryazan State University
Esoteric Imagery in Some Modern English Poems
The poets not only use metaphors, their poems are metaphors
K. Hewitt
This article is devoted to the problem of interpretation of esoteric imagery in modem English poetry. The notion 'imagery' refers to words in a figurative meaning. There are lots of cases when poetic imagery requires special interpretation and deep analysis - these are the cases of language esotericism. In poetry esotericism, as a system of hidden philosophic thoughts about the essence of phenomena, can be revealed through corresponding interpretation of poems. We use the term 'esoteric' in the indirect meaning: an unusual metaphor, comparison of objects or phenomena in a metaphor, something implicit that can be decoded only in the process of the analysis of imagery.
Among the basic concepts of English poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have singled out the concept of 'death' which is a source of esoteric imagery. The review of the concept 'death' in English poetry of this period is carried out using material from An Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry edited by K.Hewitt and V.Ganin and from English poems of the modernistic tradition.
In some poems of the Anthology the concept 'death' is implied, encoded; in others this topic is explicitly given in the title, which prepares the reader for facing this concept beforehand. In W.H. Auden’s Tuneral Blues' the usage of the adjective 'funeral' in combination with the noun 'blues' on the one hand calls up associations with the word
combination 'funeral/dead march' and on the other hand the title makes the reader understand that we hear the music of grief and loss, which is created for the author from the variety of components. In Philip Larkin’s 'An Arundel Tomb' the denotative meaning of the noun «tomb» firstly makes it clear that the poem concerns a person marked by history and whose name is imprinted in centuries (in this case it’s the Earl of Arundel) and secondly this meaning to a greater degree presupposes philosophic reflection of the person’s fate, of his deeds without too sorrowful or mournful tone. In Charles Tomlinson’s 'Marat Dead' the word 'death' is placed in the title together with a proper name, so that the matter is either about the description of the hero’s death itself, or about the story of the hero’s life together with feelings, emotions and consequences caused by his death; in this poem Tomlinson speaks about Marat - one of the radical Jacobin leaders -the hero of J.L. David’s picture.
The review of the poetic material selected in the Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry gives us an opportunity to perceive the artistic design of this concept and to broaden lexical field of its expression. Firstly, these can be separate lexemes in the poems on different topics: village graves in Tomlinson’s 'The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of Stone'. The poet creates an opposition between 'village graves' and 'village green' in his picture they are separated by a stone construction, which leaves a pass back and forth; these word combinations are alike graphically and phonetically - just a few phonemes turn 'village green1 into 'village graves'. The same thing happens in reality - a few seconds may turn life to death and the world of the living (cities, towns, villages, etc.) is separated from the world of the dead (cemeteries) only by a gate in a fence. In Anne Stevenson’s 'in the Tunnel of Summers' we observe the interconnection of the direct meaning cemetery with the connotation of the word 'tunnel' - passing through a long tunnel of time you see deaths of many generations. In T. S. Eliot’s 'La Figlia che Piange' the word combination garden urn is mentioned - a burial urn is set in a cinerarium of a memorial park.
Secondly, we can reveal associative sets of vocabulary in the poems devoted to death, which attest the creative manner of a poet, his
preferences in the expression of this concept: Tomlinson's 'Marat De-ad’; death, sadness, calm, effigy, blooded, reddening (bath), silence, r'.¿¿ding, blood., monument; Anne Stevenson's 'Musician’s Widow'; aemh unjust death, remembered, hollow, to burn the body, nostalgia; Tony Harrison's 'Book Ends'; drop dead, shocked, to be scared, silence, life is shattered into smithereens, sullen looks; W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues'; barking dog, silence the pianos, muffled drum, mourners, moaning aeroplanes, crepe bows, black cotton gloves. Thus in his poem 'Funeral Blues’ W. H. Auden projects the inner emotional experience of the hero into the outer world mainly at the expense of audiovisual effects such as sound and colour. The sound is represented by a barking dog (there is a popular belief that a long and shrill dog's badc/howl foretokens death), playing pianos - 'silence the pianos' orders the poet, muffled beat of the drum, which metes out the steps of ihe funeral ceremony, the mourners and the sound of 'moaning' aeroplanes in the sky. Besides it’s emphasized by alliteration. The colour is expressed through the contrast of funeral crepe and white doves, which are supposed to wear it, through the chain of black gloves, which should wear the traffic policemen along the grey road.
Thirdly, we singled out the cases of ambiguity when a word or word combination used by the poet can express both a meaning connected with death and a neutral one; Thus Larkin’s dead straight miles en the one hand realize a colloquial meaning 'absolutely straight ■ . on the other hand there is an actualization of the connotative
; exponent dead - maximum speed which one can gather on a straight : r ad is a breakneck pace with mortal dangers; it’s an actual realization :: the idiom 'to belt down the road'. Tomlinson’s doom can mean fate :: death decease, loss', the poet speaks about an important part of the T/Drsophy of life - wisdom, morality, necessity, awareness, that’s
:;ie context of the poem actualizes both meanings.
Individual author’s symbols typical of the creative imagination of a certain poet: in Ted Hughes’ 'Daffodils': scissors are the symbol of broken hopes, unrealized plans; they are the reminder of his dead wife. In Stevenson’s 'In the Tunnel of Summers' complicated esoteric imagery is found in the phrase the long straw cemetery - it’s a mown
field - a symbolic cemetery of mankind; hay mowing is associated with death - an allusion to the traditional depiction of death with a scythe; here we also find the phrase fly-sweet hay - an analogy of decaying hay to the human flesh after death. For Tony Harrison, in the poem 'Long Distance', the long distance is an insurmountable distance, time, memory, pain etc., everything that separates the living from the dead. And as far as the disconnected number is concerned, the number doesn’t answer, it is cut-off. The thing is that people are gone but their telephone numbers still exist just like our memories, dialing symbolizes resurrection of a person and feelings connected with him in our memory, our heart. Besides the analysis showed that the artistic implementation of the concept death can have an unexpected aspect; we call it 'replacement, a conscious substitution of actions'. Tony Harrison speaks about the death of his mother; his father can’t accept the fact that the woman he has loved all his life is not in this world anymore. By contrast with death the author uses the verbs to pop out to get the tea, to go shopping - it’s easier for the poet’s father to think that his wife is doing shopping and that very soon he’ll hear the sound of her key in the keyhole and he won’t suffer any more.
A rather unexpected representation of the artistic concept death is shown through its correlation with the concepts beauty. This combination of concepts functions differently; in some cases death transforms, decorates, ennobles: in Tomlinson’s Marat Dead- ugliness has gone -an ugly man, Marat, gains beauty after death, the same happens with inner beauty - the Jacobin leader, bellicose and tyrannical, becomes a general hero who met the death of a martyr. In other cases the poet glorifies the beauty of those who mourn over the dead: T. S. Eliot's 'La Figlia che Piange' — “Lean on a garden urn — Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair”.
A concept has a complicated, multidimensional structure, which includes various connotations, 'concepts are not only conceived but also experienced. They are the objects of emotions, sympathies and antipathies' (Stepanov. Y. Constants: Dictionary of Russian Culture, 2004). The connotation of the concept 'Death' - misfortune, grief, depression - pierce through the poems devoted to the loss of close peo-
: le. Tony Harrison in the poem 'Long Distance' painfully describes the reaction of his father to the death of his mother; and then - after the death of the father - the poet understands that he himself doesn’t want :: lose the illusion that his parents have just gone somewhere out, and so Aai lie rewrites their telephone number into his new phone book. Parents’ death in Tony Harrison’s 'Background Material' - mam and їла.... both dead - is expressed through an extended esoteric image of a photo, which conceals the author-son; his sorrow and love to the ¿5ad parents are revealed through the prosaic description of the pho-tts. which keep everyday moments and holidays, they are not of the best quality, but we understand that they are so dear, because only a loving person can keep in his memory such small details - in his, if you look close, the gleam, the light, me in his blind right eye.
Death and revival, resurrection are the motif of the poem ’Musician's Widow' by Anne Stevenson. The observation of this poem from tae point of view of “script”, the set of expectations of what is to come t~der the given situation, allows to guess how events shape themselves and what the further line of behavior prescribed in this situation is. The resolution to overcome grief caused by the death of the husband is an incentive to a new life, to the revival of the woman; the esotericism of imagery consists in the fact that woe caused by death is at the same time revival - the inner state of the woman is shown by means of the images related to gardening:
And she had to come back as woman to the world, a green-branched seedling of her purpose, need, the life behind her gaping like a seed.
- a new life resembles a sprout that makes its way through the seed. Тле same metaphoric idea of'resurrection' is expressed in Tomlinson’s Curtain Call' by where we witness Death in a dramatic representation
- death on the stage:
The dead in their dressing rooms
sweat out the sequel
through greasepaint and brocade
O to have died
On the last note of a motif...
Death here is followed by 'resurrection' at the end of the performance when all the actors take a bow: - '
... But the applause ; * •.:*
draws them on to resurrection.
The review of modem English poetry allows us to draw a conclusion that the most frequent metaphoric concept that expresses the idea of death is Nature: the long straw cemetery in the poem of Anne Stevenson 'In the Tunnel of Summers'. In this case the direct meaning of the noun 'cemetery' is included in the metaphoric phrase 'the long straw cemetery' (in its direct meaning - 'a mown field'). Such conceptual inclusion is based on the fact that one of the slots in the frame hay mowing is occupied by the mowing tool - scythe, which is also present in the frame death as a mythological image of death with a scythe - the great reaper. Here 'the long straw cemetery' is metaphorically connected with human death; besides this is a long straw cemetery in the center of which there stands a heroine: the field behind her back is a symbolic cemetery of the generations of ancestors, the field stretching in front of her is a cemetery of the generations of the descendants:
They are already building the long straw cemete -v : where my granddaughter’s daughter has been born
- • and buried.
'Death' in the poems under study is represented in respect of real events that have happened to the authors of poetic texts; in the cases mentioned above it is the natural death of relatives. In the poem 'Daffodils' by Ted Hughes, the idea of the wife’s death is not shown distinctly, but here the suicide of Sylvia Plath is implied, she died in February 1963, when there was a record low temperature in England: he would die in the same great freeze; the phrase as you they return to forget drops a hint on the flowers on the graves in memory of the dead. Violent death as a result of a murder is shown in Tomlinson’s 'Marat Dead'; we come across the 'double representation' of death: the fact of the real murder with all the details and the description of death depicted in J.L. David’s picture.
In the poem 'Refugee Blues' by W. H, Auden we find the crds 'Hitler ... they must die’ - death is shown as terror and mass nird-et genocide in the eyes of those who are to be killed; the lives of rzzny people depend on the will of one person, it’s really terrible to -ndeisfcand that you can be killed by the only wish of a tyrant because 2 : _ don’t fit in his philosophy of life:
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: "They must die ";
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.
Here we also find an unusual word combination officially dead: nni as disparagement and revocation of the right to live - death de jure - a worldwide jungle of redtape, the conflicts of states, abeyant --r> snon often cause not only the violations of human rights but also ne trial deprivation of rights: If you’ve got no passport you're offl-~xdh- dead W. H. Auden describes the experience of German Jews, tcfjgees in the USA without official documents and that’s w?hy within civil rights: “We are very sorry but such person does not exist, YOU do not exist”.
In a number of poems the notion death itself acts as a metaphoric —age. For example, Carol Rumens in her 'Simple Poem' compares rating with the beloved person to death, at the same time she ex-rresses a desire that «everything should die because her love's gone forever:
Why doesn’t everything die
now you’re not here?
The same idea - the desire that everything in this world should die is expressed in the above mentioned poem by W. H. Auden 'Funeral Blues' - “For nothing now can ever come to any good” - the '¿safe, of the beloved is perceived as hopelessness, the loss of the purport of life and as a result the desire that the whole world: celestial todies, nature, oceans — should die.
To crown it all we can say that the poems we deal with are nota-tle for the esoteric imagery based on the conceptual metaphor, which is in most cases an extended one and is frequently realized within the
whole poem. Artistic conceptual metaphors are marked by a distinctive character, by vividness, mysteriousness, sophisticated esoteric imagery; they reflect an individual author’s world view. And the specific character of means and ways of aesthetic representation of the concept “death” in the poems under analysis enables us to speak about the individual author’s originality in the explication of the artistic concept within the individual poetic code.
[The Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry from which most of these examples are taken is published by Perspective Publications. Readers can order copies of it by sending an email to Karen Hewitt. <karen.hewitt@conted.ox.ac.uk>]
