Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot;
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Here are images of cold—winter, freeze; of touch—blow, breath; of pain—tooth, bite, sting, sharp; of taste—bitter. How vividly they convey the ache of desolation! Only in words which are imaginative as well as musical are the full resources of verbal expression employed.
All the various forms of metaphorical language have the same purpose: by substituting for a more abstract, conceptual mode of expression a more sensuous and imaginative one, to vivify the emotional quality of the situation. When Keats sings,
… on the shore Of the wide world I stand and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink,
he has in mind to convey to us that renunciation of merely personal ambitions which comes to us when we "survey all time and all existence." And how does he do it? By evoking the image of the wide stretch of the shore of the sea, which, making us feel our nothingness as we stand and look out upon it, has the same effect, only more poignant. Of the world we have no image—not so, of the shore of the world; and toward what we cannot imagine we cannot easily feel. Oftentimes the metaphor is latent, a mere adjective undeveloped in its implications, as in "bitter" sky; yet the purpose is the same. Incidentally the poet unifies our world for us through his metaphors; not as the scientist does by pointing out causal and class relations, but by exhibiting the emotional affinities of things. He increases the value of single things by giving them the values of other things. Every metaphor should serve this purpose of emotional expression and unification, should be part of an emotional thought; otherwise it is a mere tour de force of cleverness, unrelated to the poetic interest and intrinsically absurd,—the world has no shore and the wind is not bitter; feeling alone can justify such comparisons. Moreover, too many metaphors, or metaphors too elaborately developed, by scattering the attention, or by drawing it away from the meaning of which the image should be a part, have the effect of no image at all. The poetry of Francis Thompson, for example, loses rather than gains vitality through its imaginative exuberance. We object to decadent poets, not because they are sensuous, but because they lack feeling; with them sensation, instead of supporting emotion, supplants it. Such poets seek to atone for their want of vigorous feeling by stimulating our eyes and ears.
If, as I believe, emotional thought rather than imagery is the essence of poetry, then the modern school of imagists and their French forbears among the "Parnassiens" are mistaken. Their effort comes in the end to a revival of the old thesis ut pictura poesis, the attempt to make poetry a vision of nature rather than an expression of the inner life. They would lead poetry away from the subjectivity of emotion into the outer object world. Now, it is indeed possible for the poet to represent nature through the images which words evoke in the mind, and these images may have significance for feeling. Their very evocation in musical language is bound to lend them some warmth of mood. Yet—as Lessing showed in his Laocoon, despite all the crabbed narrowness of his treatment—it is hopeless for the poet to enter into rivalry with the painter or sculptor. The colors and forms of things which the poet paints for the eye of the mind are mere shadows in comparison with those which we really see.[Footnote: The best the poet-painter can do is to express his memories of the outer world; but apart from some vivid emotion, memories are unsatisfactory in comparison with realities.] We admire the marvelous workmanship of such verses as the following of Gautier, but they leave us cold; even the melody of the language is incapable of making them warm. How poor they are beside a painting!
Les femmes passent sous les arbres
En martre, hermine et menu-vair
Et les deesses, frileux marbres,
Ont pris aussi l'abit d'hiver.
La Venus Anadyomene
Est en pelisse a capuchon:
Flore, que la brise malmene,
Plonge ses mains dans son manchon.
Et pour la saison, les bergeres
De Coysevox et de Coustou,
Trouvant leures echarpes legeres
Ont des boas autour du cou.