The Adequate Symbol
By Doug Talley

The late poet Jane Kenyon, in talking about her art, quoted Ezra Pound, “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

“The image,” she wrote, “does the work of carrying feeling … Believe it, act on it, and your poems will not fly off into abstraction.” In such poems, “the inner world is revealed in terms of the outer world — revealed in terms of things” Jane Kenyon, A Hundred White Daffodils, Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN (1999) p. 140.

This approach became her creed and she wrote some compelling poetry as a result, as evident in these sample lines from the poem, “Let Evening Come”:

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come …

Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come, Graywolf Press, St. Paul, MN (1990) p. 69.

In this poem Kenyon wrote of accepting the inevitability of death and preparing the soul for its onset as one might ready for dusk and nightfall. The poem is quite simple, constructed of a number of natural images suggesting nightfall, periodically capped with a lyrical refrain, “Let evening come.” The skill of the poem, and its interest, are found in the careful selection of the natural images, their precise articulation, and their transformation into symbols of death and the suggestion of life after death. The image of a descending sunlight shining through chinks in a barn, “moving / up the bales as the sun moves down,” suggests an ascension of the spirit even while light is fading. The poem hints at a resurrection of life in some fashion, and Kenyon, who possessed a deep Christian sensibility, alluded to the statement of Christ at the Last Supper — “I will not leave you comfortless” — with the final lines of the poem:

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God will not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

The poem proves a compelling affirmation of Kenyon’s method of composition. It confirms her aesthetic theory that natural objects create the adequate symbols of a broader, deeper meaning, in this case, a spiritual meaning — the objects of the outer world manipulated by art to depict an inner world.

The Modern Fashion

Modern poetry is rife with examples of the same method, which at least by the 1970s had become fixed dogma in the university writing workshop — “No ideas but in things!” Ezra Pound’s emphasis on the specific image gave rise to a school, unimaginatively called Imagism, the influence of which still prevails over most contemporary poetry.

As a young man Pound elbowed his way into the circle of William Butler Yeats and clearly fell under the spell of the older poet. Yeats was instinctively himself a symbolist, as in lines such as these from “Adam’s Curse”:

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of the daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems, Collier Books, New York, NY (1962) p. 29.

Yeats with seemingly little effort transformed one natural object, the moon, into another, a worn shell “washed by time’s waters” and made both the adequate symbol of a weary heart. This transformation may seem effortless, but the whole poem ironically laments how much labor is involved since Adam’s fall in creating anything beautiful, including a poem, and how that labor seems to exhaust the soul:

I said: ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

In that hollow shell of a moon, which has become the heart, one hears the echo of the preacher from Ecclesiastes crying, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” I never fail to be deeply moved by this poem when I read it, and I suppose its whisper haunts me in some fashion every morning when I sit down to my own work. But whatever might be said about the feeling of futility suggested by “Adam’s Curse,” it is clear that the feeling’s source is found in Yeats’ treatment of the natural object of the moon.

But the rule is not necessarily universal that only the natural object may serve as an adequate symbol. It applies well enough to certain kinds of poetry, but not to all. The rule would have never satisfied Dante, who had to invent objects outside the natural world to convey his visions, visions that eventually culminated in ineffable descriptions of heaven in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy. How would a poet describe heaven if blessed with such a vision? How would a poet describe the love that prevails there?

The Supernatural Object

Dante was already beginning to work out his approach to these questions when he wrote the Vita Nuova (“New Life”), a kind of prose and verse treatise on the art of poetry. The subject of this booklet was the young and gentle Beatrice, who eventually became for Dante the image of idealized love and served as his guide throughout the visions of the Paradiso. To describe his love for her, which was nothing short of celestial adoration, he resorted to images that were not part of our natural world. In Chapter 3 of Vita Nuova, Dante relates a vision he had while slumbering and upon waking decided to describe the vision in a sonnet that he sent to other poets for consideration. The following includes an excerpt of the prose narrative and the sonnet, first in the original Italian, followed by its translation:

E pensando di lei, mi sopragiunse uno soave sonno, ne lo quale m’apparve una maravigliosa visione: che me parea vedere ne la mia camera una nebula di colore di fuoco, dentro a la quale io discernea una figura d’uno segnore di pauroso aspetto a chi la guardasse; e pareami con tanta letizia, quanto a sé, che mirabile cosa era; e ne le sue parole dicea molte cose, le quali io non intendea se non poche; tra le quali intendea queste: Ego dominus tuus. Ne le sue braccia mi parea vedere una persona dormire nuda, salvo che involta mi parea in uno drappo sanguigno leggeramente; la quale io riguardando molto intentivamente, conobbi ch’era la donna de la salute, la quale m’avea lo giorno dinanzi degnato di salutare. E ne l’una de le mani mi parea che questi tenesse una cosa la quale ardesse tutta, e pareami che mi dicesse queste parole: Vide cor tuum. E quando elli era stato alquanto, pareami che disvegliasse questa che dormia; e tanto si sforzava per suo ingegno, che le facea mangiare questa cosa che in mano li ardea, la quale ella mangiava dubitosamente. Appresso ciò poco dimorava che la sua letizia si convertia in amarissimo pianto; e così piangendo, si ricogliea questa donna ne le sue braccia, e con essa mi parea che si ne gisse verso lo cielo; onde io sostenea sì grande angoscia, che lo mio deboletto sonno non poteo sostenere, anzi si ruppe e fui disvegliato.

************

A ciascun’ alma presa e gentil core

nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente,

in ciò che mi rescrivan suo parvente,
salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.

Già eran quasi che atterzate l’ore
del tempo che onne stella n’è lucente,
quando m’apparve Amor subitamente,
cui essenza membrar mi dà orrore.

Allegro mi sembrava Amor tenendo
meo core in mano, e ne le braccia avea
madonna involta in un drappo dormendo.

Poi la svegliava, e d’esto core ardendo
lei paventosa umilmente pascea:|
appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.

And thus while thinking of her, a mild slumber overcame me, during which a marvelous vision was granted: I seemed to see in my room a haze the color of fire, in which I discerned the figure of a lord, of fearful aspect to those who regarded him, and yet, it seemed, possessed of such inner joy it was wonderful to behold; and in so many words he spoke a great many things, of which I understood but few, namely this: “I am your lord.” In his arms I seemed to see a person sleeping, undressed but for the tender draping of a sanguine-colored cloth, whom I observed quite intently and knew to be the lady of blessedness who the day before had consented to greet me. And in one of his hands it seemed that this lord held something entirely consumed in flame and that he spoke to me these words: “Behold, your heart.” And after he had lingered somewhat, it seemed he roused the lady from sleep and so impressed upon her his art that he caused her to eat the thing burning in his hand, which she ate with trepidation. Shortly thereafter, his joy transformed into the most bitter grief, and while weeping, he gathered the lady into his arms and seemed to bear her into heaven, which caused me such great agony, I could no longer sustain my diminishing sleep, but rather broke from slumber and awoke. . . .

************

To every gentle heart and raptured soul,

those who come to read this present rhyme

and, if it please, return their view in kind,
in the name of Love, who is our lord, all hail.

The third night hour had almost passed, the time
when all stars flicker, whether bright or pale,
and suddenly upon me Love in person stole,
the horror of whose aspect still sears the mind.
And yet with joy, it seemed, He held in hand
my heart, and in His arms a woman sleeping,
in naught else but a sanguine linen found.

He roused her, and on my burning heart, keeping
all still and fearful, she humbly fed as bound.
Then, as the vision closed, Love left me, weeping.

(D. Talley translation)

Haze the color of fire, the woman in a sanguine cloth held in Love’s arm, the flaming heart held in Love’s hand, are all images obviously not patterned upon the natural order of things. Actually, the idea of a beloved woman feeding on a man’s heart was already by Dante’s time conventional, but the point remains that images other than natural objects were felt by the poet to be the appropriate symbols for love.

This approach to depict the sublime, the use of something other than a natural object, was refined by Dante to the point of mastery. He gathered natural objects and transformed them into something supernatural, as in Canto XXX of the Paradiso where he entered the Tenth Heaven, the Empyrean, and saw a gold river of light and “living sparks” shooting from it that landed on spring-like flowers on the river banks:

E vidi lume in forma di rivera
fulvido in fulgore, entra due rive
dipinte di mirabil primavera.
Di tal fiumana uscian faville vive
e d’ogne parte se mettien ne’ fiori,
quasi rubin che oro circunscrive.

And I saw light in the form of a river,
golden in radiance, between two banks
painted with miraculous spring flowers,
and from the stream shot living sparks
that settled on the flowers everywhere,
as though they were rubies set in gold.

(D. Talley translation)

This was only the beginning of the vision. When Dante drank from the river with his eyes, the vision transformed from the linear to the circular, and with purer eyes he saw that the sparks and flowers were the two hosts of heaven — those with faith in Christ prior to his coming and those with faith in him after his coming — now transformed into a vast, mystic, yellow rose.

An Alternative Possibility

The natural object may prove an adequate symbol for common states of the inner life, but Dante persuades the reader that nothing short of a supernatural object serves as the adequate symbol for an otherworldly state. Allegory is not precisely the method at work here; this is not merely a natural event corresponding to deeper meaning, like the offering of a sacrificial lamb or the partaking of the Sacrament serving as a symbol of Christ’s Atonement. For lack of any other term, we might use the word “visionist” to describe the method. The poet lays aside the things of this world and envisions the things of a better. The language of that world will be as bold and fantastic as the vision that informs it — a burning ember of coal laid on the poet’s tongue to purify speech.

I would like to believe that a visionist method is not only possible, but is the peculiar opportunity and province of the Latter-day Saint poet. If any genius were already native to the poetic sensibility of the Latter-day Saints, it would be found in the history of their visions.