THE IMAGE NARRATIVE

Richard Jackson

This is a way of looking at your poems with an eye towards revision. It is a way of looking at them from the inside out. At the heart of every poem is a kind of tension, as Allen Tate calls it, a counter pointing between the dynamic forces of the language. We might call this the structural dynamic, an example of which might be how most of the "good" characters in King Lear speak a language of nature while most of the "bad characters speak a language of commerce, politics and militarism: the collision of language types is a collision of visions. Emily Dickinson often creates tension by counter pointing images that relate to the conservative religion of her time, often echoing the Bible, against images of erotic love, as in "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" where the image of Death is a suitor taking her off on the one hand to eternity but dressed in a seductive "gossamer" and "tulle." But these images would be chaotic if they were not arranged in some fashion, what we might call, after Cesare Pavese, the image narrative, a concept that suggests that the images themselves, their connotations and associations, create a kind of narrative in the reader's (and poet's) mind. This is sort of an "underplot" that props up the surface "plot" or structure of the poem (format) and is really the essence of form. Each poem creates its own language in that the words take on special, often different, or shaded meanings in the context of this image narrative. The image narrative itself is what orchestrates and paces our responses and emotions as they move through the poem.

Pavese writes about his poem "Landscape I" (which describes a hermit and by the end of the poem relates him intimately, through images, to the world around him, and that world to him, so that to speak of one by the end of the poem is to speak of the other also)--

I had discovered the value of the image. And this new image of mine (here was my reward for my stubborn insistence on concrete narrative) was not imagery in the familiar rhetorical sense, i.e., a more or less arbitrary decoration imposed on realistic narrative. In some obscure sense, my image was the story itself.

The fact that the hermit appeared to be "the color of burnt bracken" did not mean that I had established a parallel between hermit and bracken in order to give prominence to either. It meant that I had discovered an imaginative relationship or link between hermit and landscape (I could go on: links between hermit and girls, city visitors and peasants, girls and vegetation, hermit and she-goat, hermit and dung, high and low) and that this relationship itself was the subject of the story.

I was narrating this relationship, studying it as a significant whole created by the imagination and so imaginatively "seeded" that it could be further refined and developed.

The pattern of this linking, the arc of development it follows through the poem, is its image narrative. The more we are aware of the way the tensions in the poem are worked out through the image narrative, the better we can see -- intuit-- where the poem might take some other turn, or where it has taken a wrong or confusing turn.

Let's take another example from Paves himself, his poem "Summer"--

A garden between low walls, bright,

Made of dry grass and a light that slowly bakes

The ground below. The light smells of sea.

You breathe that grass. You touch your hair

And shake out the memory of grass.

I have seen ripe

Fruit dropping thickly on remembered grass with a soft

Thudding. So too the pulsing of the blood

Surprises even you. You move your head

As though a miracle of air had happened around you,

And the miracle is you. Your eyes have a savor

Like the heat of memory.

You listen.

You listen to the words, but they barely graze you.

Your face has a radiance of thought that shines

Around your shoulders, like light from the sea. The silence

In your face touches the heart with a soft

Thud, exuding drop by drop,

Like fruit that fell here years ago,

an old pain still.

The images of brightness and light become associated with smells-- "the light smells of the sea" he says at one early point and then the smell is associated with memory, with the woman and her hair, with the grass that moves like sea, with the thud of apples on the grass, which in turn leads to the pulse of blood. Then for a moment the poet circles back to the air that is filled with light and smell, sees it circling the woman whose eyes -- we are back with the image of light now -- "have a savor / like the heat of memory," savor bringing us back to taste and smell. Everything is quiet the words become like the fruit-- "they barely graze you." The woman's face reflects the sea that was the dominant image of the opening, and now the silent heart becomes the muted thud, and the (silence) thud itself seems to drops like the fruit of years ago, like memory. Taste, sight, touch images begin to define one another so that the senses begin to radiate out, embrace each other, and so that, on the surface level of meaning and plot, the poem can shift from a descriptive and external sense of nostalgia at the opening to a more internal sense of pain at the end. The image narrative has transported us into ourselves by metamorphosing its own images, letting them develop and grow as a story.

The metamorphosing that goes on in Pavese's poems, and indeed, in any strong image poem, involves seeing two (or more) poles, A and B, and more than saying simply A is like B, the poem starts to describe each in terms of the other so that by the end the poem has discovered a new language, as it were, what Auden, at least, thought was the business of poetry inn the first place.

Looking at a poem this way, at a draft of a poem, allows us to see some of the sometimes unconscious forces of association that the language leads us to, and so offers some suggestions for revision. It also allows us to be aware at an early stage of what is going on in the language before something is really formulated, and so makes us more aware of, to adapt a phrase from Hugo, of the relationships among triggering images. Finally, it allows us to see, when we think of the final stages of a poem, how all these forces and narratives are being played out on the surface, thus giving more depth and resonance to our ideas about making final revisions.

Notes From Pavese, Hard Labor, tr. Arrowsmith, Ecco Press, 1979.