Symbolism

Thursday, 05 March 2009 19:00 GFP Columnist - Dr. Stephen Gill
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The accurate representation of the feelings, thoughts, moods, sights, ideas and a variety of emotions is a serious enigma which poets face. Their representations are about personal opinions that are in the mind. Without going into philosophical or logical depth, I call them the god within.

Language is inadequate to bring out the god within, because this god is intangible. In addition to a mastery over the language, communicators need special skills and movements of hands, raising of eyebrows, changing tones, shrugging of shoulders and other gestures. Still, communications are not fully accurate and are likely to be misunderstood. Verbosity does not help either. Communication becomes more difficult in poetry because it is a form of condensed expression.

Therefore, poets use symbols to represent the god within at a higher level and also to add beauty. They take the help of metaphors to represent the god within. Aristotle said that metaphor is the soul of poetry. Metaphor is a figure of speech that is used for implied comparison. I have used this device freely in my poetry, such as “sickles of bigotry,”1; “pilots of words”2; “snakes of personal migraines”3; “the albatross of intolerance”4; and “a pyramid of justice”5 to quote a few.

Symbol, a higher form of metaphor, comes from the Greek word sumbolon that means sign, mark and token. In Greek sumballein means to put together. Synonyms of symbolism include typology, metaphor and analogy. Symbolic poetry is visible expression of something that is invisible -- a marriage between abstraction and concrete. This device is used to express the hidden meaning veiled by the obvious meaning -- to express something that is abstract as tangible. This device is also used to express something that is tangible in another tangible way.

 

Poetry is not a set of general statements. It is not verbosity either. It is a short cut to convey the message. The poetry that is symbolic may have several layers of meaning that is like peeling off the layers of an onion. It is also something like music that produces a mood.

A poet may pick up colors for non-verbal communication that goes beyond ink. A skilled designer of a logo or web site would be careful to select colors because they have impact on the mind and eye. He may keep in view that the impact of colors differs from culture to culture.

Words and punctuation marks as well as traffic signs, such as red lights that mean to stop, are some examples of obvious symbols. A red rose, a traditional symbol, signifies love and fidelity. Among other traditional symbols, a cross signifies a follower of Christ and the sunrise, a new beginning. The picture of scales is often used to represent justice. Traditionally, a lion represents bravery; a dove represents peace and purity, and the water, life. The symbol of winter or snow suggests aging and decay.

Creative artists also develop new, individual or personal symbols, mainly because they do not want to use cliché or trite expressions. Some of these individual symbols may pose problems for readers. To understand them, a reader may have to go over the poem more than once with close attention.

I have presented several of my poems in this vein. I often use the wind in various forms to symbolize my god within. Among several, I would like to select “To a Dove”6 that appears on page 132-133 and “Flight of a Dove”7 on pages 134-135 of the Revised Edition of Shrine. I do not want to dissect them because dissection mars the beauty. Here is one quote:

I am
often greeted by the bursting flutters
of my dove
while rambling the rayless resort
of the fears
from the scamps of my surrounding.7

Another poem, “Unfair Ophelia”, is from Songs Before Shrine.8 Ophelia is a character from Hamlet by Shakespeare. Or take the case of “My Muse” on page 45 of the same collection:

Today
the jealous winds outside
smite my windows desperately
like a being insane
while inside I am at peace
with her.9

An example of non-traditional symbols appears in the first canto of The Flame which is the longest poem on modern terrorism in English. In the Preface of The Flame, and also elsewhere, I call my poems robins and explain how I care and nourish them.10

Trees and forests have appeared in different cultures as symbols. The oak has been used to signify strength, and maple to signify balance and promise. I have taken the assistance of several objects from nature to use this device. Tree is one of them. When I read my poetry objectively or as a critic after publication, I find that forests and trees have appeared often, such as “Maple trees of compassion”11; and “tree of your amazement”12. From Shrine, my collection before The Flame, the notable lines are: “the dignity of the palm tree”13; “the sobriety of the jungles,”14; “pineapples of happiness”15; “the jungles of thoughts”16; “the maple leaf of freedoms”17; “gangers grow a jungle of night”18 and the list can go on.

In the first line of canto fifteen of my longest poem, The Flame “The battered body of the abode/ of my flame /flaring in the dark…”19, builds up a picture of the night that is dark. The night suggests loneliness and symbolizes several aspects associated with darkness. The Flame is presented as a human who has been murdered brutally and its parts severed. The mention of the battered body is to conjure up horrific emotion in the reader. The whole scene suggests fear, brutality and the darkness in the soul.

Symbolic devices provide oxygen to poetry. Symbolism becomes also a sort of double talk, not as strutting in a confused way. It is not a talk like that of a drunk person or the distorted vision of a myopic. It is a deliberate attempt to say something other than what it literally means. For illustration, here is a poem “The Meechlake Fish”20 from Songs Before Shrine, where words like crocodiles, fish, bathers, banks, and waters present a scene of the sea to express another story associated with the Meech Lake Accord, an important part of Canadian political history. This Accord was signed by ten premiers and the prime minister in 1987. The Meech Lake Accord divided Canada badly in the eighties.

To express the inexpressible, the god within, symbolists usually select objects from nature, usually flowers and oceans. These objects become symbols, because they are suggestive of something else. Through this device, a poet makes the god within, tangible. My poem “The Matchlake Fish”, is an example.

Symbolists also refer to a major literary movement of the second half of the 19th century from France. The movement has received different labels, including decadence, aesticism, neoromanticism and imaginism. Its followers include Mallarme, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. Their main aim was to represent ideas and emotions by suggestion rather than description. They reacted against the prevailing school of realism and impressionism that expressed emotions or abstractions without comparing them with the visible world. Symbolists influenced painting and music as well as English writers like Poe, Swinburn and W.B. Yeats. Symbolists wrote in a highly suggestive way to express the intangible truth or conditions. They became more evocative than descriptive.

Never-the-less, the literary experiments of Symbolism cannot be dismissed. Among these, the most important is free verse, which resulted from a long process of dissolution of traditional forms and has now become an important department of poetry. The attacks the Symbolists faced were often undeserved. There existed indeed a “fin de Siecle” or decadent” affectation and a foggy or atmospheric type of art that were identified by some with Symbolism; but at no time since the Renaissance have so many experiments been carried out on the poetic values of words, and no school of poetry has so much enriched the technical means of poets.”21

Though the Symbolist Movement in literature refers to poets in the later part of the nineteenth century, it has its precursors in several religious scriptures. Symbolic literature is old and easily traceable from the time of Plato in 400 B.C. During these years, the literature of Western Europe was dominated by symbols to understand God and for proper conduct. Indian epics such as Ramayana and other books are full of symbolic features. Sufi poetry is usually symbolic because it uses worldly terminology to express divinity.

Although it is hard to pinpoint when the symbolist movement started in the history of literature, it was, actually, Jean More's article, published on September 18, 1886, in Le Figaro, which made the literary world conscious of a new trend already developing in France. Many attempts by different writers were made to trace the uniform factors in the writings of the symbolists, but they failed.

In spite of their differences, the Symbolists were unanimous in calling Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), their precursor. His poetry is neither philosophizing nor didactic. The Symbolists appreciated Baudelaire's theory of "correspondences between the senses." The same theory was applied by Rimbaud in his sonnets. Rimbaud, like Ghil, showed extraordinary interest in the use of neologism in his poetry. It is Mallarme (1842-1898), who brought symbolist poetry to its near perfection. His Divagations (1897) is an important document for the symbolists.

His Tuesday gatherings influenced many younger artists who attended them. Mallarme's poetry is an example of elusiveness. A rhythm or tone suggests the whole atmosphere. He prefers to use suggestive language and words in their etymological sense. As a result, his symbolism has become more private and obscure. Like Verlaine, he considers music to be of fundamental importance in poetry. His disciples Paul Valery who knew him personally, and Wallace Stevens, carried on his tradition. Wallace Stevens, an American, adapted his master's technique to the general vein of his country's atmosphere and temperament. Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), another symbolist and also a lyrical poet, had no theory on art to offer. He scoffed at epithets like symbolist and decadent. But regarding technique he had definite views which he expressed in "Art Poetique" (1874). Like Mallarme' he believed that poems should be musical. He preferred ambiguity to precision and a language suggestive rather than descriptive.

The Symbolists reacted against the poetry of that time, the Realist theatre and the Naturalist novel in order to express with the aid of symbols the mystery of existence. The movement was started in France and a large part of those who were involved in it were artists of French origin. Paris, being a centre of art, attracted many young writers from different parts of the globe. When these writers returned to their respective countries they carried with them the symbolists' ideas. This helped in spreading this movement to the rest of the world. Among the followers of the symbolists only Jules Laforgue, Gustave Kahn, Rene Ghil and Albert Samin were French. From England there were Arthur Symons, W. B. Yeats and George Moore; from Germany, Rilke and Hauptmann; from Belgium, Maurice Maeterlinck; from Greece, Jean More'as, who wrote the symbolists' manifesto; from America, Francis Viele' Griffin and Stuart Merrill; from Italy- D'Annunzio; and the Machado brothers from Spain.

The Symbolists avoided political and public themes in their works. They rejected society and ceased to be the official voices of their country. Therefore, with symbolism, art ceased in truth to be national and assumed the collective premises of Western culture. Its overwhelming concern was the non-temporal, non-sectarian, non-geographic and non-national problem of the human condition.22

In France, men of letters were often public figures, and literature, to a great extent, remained a part of public life—just the opposite of the normal practice in England. One of the chief factors which gave impetus to this new movement of symbolism was the complete estrangement of certain poets from the tone and attitude of public life around them.

In fact the traditional values of much French literature—values of clear, rapid, sometimes superficial reasoning, of incisive generalization, of dignified rhetoric, and pointed wit, while real virtues in themselves were, as Baudelaire noted, anti-poetic virtues.23

The Symbolists gave art the status of religion—it became mysterious with its own distinct language different from that of prose. The artists became completely isolated from the general public and their art also became vaguer. They revised their works repeatedly and thoughtfully, and so made them more and more difficult for an average reader to understand. This is the reason why even years after its publication, Ulysses, a novel, is read only by a microscopic minority of the intelligentsia. The Symbolists, who attempted to bring art and life together, did not usher in a new simplicity and clarity, but rather a new confusion. Their master, Mallarme, himself is a difficult poet. Rimbaud is also obscure. "He speaks in a trance like an inspired drunkard."24

The symbolists revolted against Parnassian poetry, yet, retained some of its concepts such as 'art for art's sake' and insistence on technical perfection. They scoffed at the scientific view of art as it was preached by Zola and Maupassant. They attempted chiefly to use a language that was suggestive and evocative rather than informative. They emphasized the careful selection of words, colours, tones, rhythms and phrases. Connotations became more important than simple denotations. Even denotations in their hands became tangled and vague. In art they became impersonal and believed in control. They employed the techniques of music in their art, for they believed that by its nature music reaches a deeper level of the unconscious. They learnt a good deal from the musical techniques of Wagnerian drama. Mallarme and Verlaine considered the musical elements in poetry to be of fundamental importance.

More'as claims that Symbolism is a reaction of the soul in literature against all those literary movements which represent things that only visibly exist, exactly as they exist. It is, he says, a reaction against a type of language that says rather than suggests. Symbolism, in practice, would free literature from the bondage of rhetoric, externals, regular beat in poetry, from the cataloguing of nature and the chance accidents of daily life, freeing the literary arts of all elements of materialism, which hitherto have prevented the disengagement of the ultimate essence of soul from its insignificant externals."25

In the theatrical world presentation of symbolism posed problems. But Antoine’s production of Ibsen revealed the possibilities of symbol on stage. Ibsen also influenced directly some English dramatists. Like Ibsen, the English dramatists combined symbolism with naturalism. Apart from Ibsen's plays, Villiers de 1' Isle-Adam's Axel was staged and Maeterlinck wrote wonderful plays suffused with a dream-like atmosphere. Alfred Jarry's highly satirical Ubu Roi (1896) caused an uproar.

The Symbolists did not make much contribution to fiction. Eduard Dujardin, a minor writer, influenced James Joyce. George Moore was friendly with Joyce. On his return to England, Joyce talked of Dujardin's technique which prompted him to read. We'll to the Woods No More. He learnt from this novel Dujardin's technique of the stream-of-consciousness which he employed very successfully in Ulysses. Moore himself, who had started his literary career in the naturalistic tradition, gave it up in favour of symbolist techniques.

Whereas the previous writers deliberately emphasized their symbols, the modern symbolists simply give the symbols and leave the rest to the imagination of the readers. They want the symbols themselves to speak. Also, their symbols form part of the whole structure of their work. To understand a novel, a play or a poem, it is very important to realize first the significance of the symbols used in it. Karl and Magalaner elaborate the difference between the traditional and the modern use of symbols:

The difference between the two is one of emphasis, and in that area we have, perhaps, the chief difference between the traditional use of the symbol and the twentieth-century application. In that area, we can ascertain one of the difficulties the modern reader has when he comes to A Portrait, or Ulysses, Mrs. Dolloway, The Waves, Women in Love, Nostromo, etc., without any awareness that these novels will proceed differently from the ones he is probably accustomed to. More carefully arranged novels, he comes to realize, need more careful readers. The modern nove¬list often merely gives the materials and lets his symbols and other devices suggest whatever the reader can make of them. Furthermore, his symbols themselves will not always be clear—they may be in many different forms: short incidents, casual images, broken conversations, minor characters, peripheral scenes. And as the now list gains in imaginative power and maturity, he refines his symbols and makes their importance more subtly provoking. For the novelist realizes that as new areas of knowledge open, new symbols are needed for expression; so the reader must be on close guard or a major theme or motif may be lost; and in novels like Nostromo, A Portrait, Ulysses, Point Counter Point, and A Passage to India, which proceed by motifs and recurrent themes, one loses entire sequences if he is not completely alert to what the novelist is doing.26

Often a distinction is made between allegorical and symbolist writings. Freud's analysis shows that no symbol can be interpreted in one way. The literary figures agree with Freud on the point that symbols cannot be tied down to a single meaning. On the other hand, an allegory has only
single possible interpretation.

To use Mr. Lain Fletcher's distinction between allegorical and symbolical poetry, if a poem is Allegorical, 'it works out the details of something already given, something which has received prior justification as theology or political theory, an organization of intuitions and judgments. Valuation of this will depend on the structure of the poem, its music, its detail. With the poetry of symbol none of these things is of the first importance. A symbol has been defined as the expression of some otherwise inexpressible truth; and it is not on the verbal music, or on the incidental illustrations of the theme, that judgment will depend, but on the insight which the poem accords into the life of the soul.27

Arthur Symons, a poet-critic and also a prominent member of the Rhymers Club, holds an important position in the realm of modern English Literature. During his stay in France he regularly attended Mallarme's Tuesday gatherings. On coming back to England he put down what he had heard at those meetings in the form of criticism, evaluation and translation, in his book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), dedicated to W. B. Yeats. The same year another book connected with symbolism, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, appeared in Vienna.

Although unlike in method, both recorded the search for a psychic reality which had little to do with exterior reality. Symons' book, like Freud's, gave a name to the preoccupation with modes of half-uttered or half-glimpsed meaning which, as we can see clearly enough now sixty years have passed, was a principal direction in modern thought.28

Symons' book acquainted the English people with new literary developments in France. His essays on Mallarme', Rimbaud, Verlaine, Huysman, Villiers de PIsle-Adam and Laforgue are better than the sketchy work of George Moore. For Yeats, a new vista of imagination was opened through the writings of these French writers. Villiers de 1'Isle Adam's "Axel became Yeats's guide and beacon in his theory and practice of a dramatic art where symbol replaces
characters, events are allegories and words keep more than half their secrets to themselves."29 Yeats employed symbolism, as it is generally believed, for the same purpose for which Baudelaire put on the mask of a dandy. About Yeats as well as Baudelaire and his successors, it would be better "to speak of a Philistine City with the poets moving about it as spies, wearing a disguise, and communicating by a code that made their presence unsuspected.30

Yet it should be remembered that Yeats was not being freshly introduced to the nature and function of the literary symbol of his new contacts; his study of magic, his work on Blake,and his natural literary inclination had already brought symbols into his early works.

The Wanderings of Oisin is sufficient evidence. In a letter to Katherine Tynan, written toward the end of 1888, he spoke of the poem as saying several things under disguise of Symbolism.31

Among Indian poets, Gitanjali of Tagore stands out in the gallery of symbolists. The name of W.B. Yeats conjures up with Tagore. W.B. Yeats, an aristocrat by birth, was a good friend of Rabindanath Tagore, another aristocrat by birth. Yeats blue-pencilled Tagore’s Gitanjali and also nominated him for the Nobel Prize. Yeats was already a Nobel Laureate when he nominated Tagore. Yeats was a great admirer of Charles Baudelaire as a symbolist. The poems that greatly mirror the influence of the Symbolists include Yeats’s two Byzantium poems and the second coming. He used the devices of symbolism most favorably to make his poetry rich, elegant and communicative at a higher level.

Whereas W.B. Yeats wrote partly under the influence of the French Symbolist Movement, Rabindranath Tagore wrote Gitanjali under the influence of the centuries-old tradition of India. He makes use of the images of the flute, harp, flowers, fire, empty vessel and journey in the Indian tradition to represent his inexpressible devotion.

I believe that personalities are shaped by the hands of the environment as pots are shaped by the hands of potters Yeats was shaped to a great extent by the French symbolists and Tagore by the early religious poetry of India. It is difficult for me to trace one single hand that shaped the art of my poetry. I can say that I cannot get away from the New Delhi of my early days, though I left India decades ago. In one way or the other, the well of New Delhi keeps providing water of creativity to my pen. I can also say that my poetry does not emerge at the annual festivals of poets. It does not emerge either at the releases of collections by publishers and celebrities nor does it emerge at the podiums. My poetry emerges gracefully when I trim off fat from the body of my muse, and knock off the wretched redundancies, freeing her from the pollutants of overused expressions. I feel better off after my faithful experimentations with imageries in the laboratory of linguistic surgery. This brings my poetry closer to the school of the symbolists than to any other school.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Gill, Stephen. Shrine. India: Cyberwit.net, 2008, ISBN: 978-81-8253-128-4, p. 78
2. Songs Before Shrine. India: authorspress, New Delhi, 2007, ISBN:81-7273-384-4, p. 77
3. Gill. op.cit, p.114
4. Gill, Stephen. The Flame. Canada: Vesta Publicaitons, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-919301-21-3, p. 106
5. --, p.98
6. Shrine. India: Cyberwit.net, 2008, ISBN: 978-81-8253-128-4, pages 132-133
7. --, p.134-135
8. Gill, Stephen. Songs Before Shrine. India: authorspress, New Delhi, 2007, ISBN: 81-7273-384-4,pages 29-30
9. --, p.45
10. The Flame. Canada: Vesta Publicaitons, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-919301-21-3, p. 7
11. --, p.41
12. --, p.48
13. Gill, Stephen. Shrine. India: Cyberwit.net, 2008, ISBN: 978-81-8253-128-4, p. 41
14. --, p.41
15. --, p.44
16. --, p.46
17. --, p.55
18. --, p.93
19. The Flame. Canada: Vesta Publicaitons, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-919301-21-3, p. 59
20. Gill, Stephen. Songs Before Shrine. India: authorspress, New Delhi, 2007, ISBN: 81-7273-384-4, p. 22
21. Collier’s Encyclopedia, Toronto, Canada, vol. 21
22. Balakian, Anna. The Symbolist Movement. USA: Random House, New York, 1967, p. 10
23. Fraser, G.S. The Modern Writer and His World. England: Pelican Books, 1967, p. 35
24. --, p. 42
25. Karl, Frederick R. & Magalaner, Marvin. A Readers Guide to Great Twentieth-Century English Novels. USA ( New York): The Noonday Press, 1964, p. 18
26. Hone, Joseph. W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. 1942, p.156
27. Fraser, G.S. The Modern Writer and His World. England: Pelican Books, 1967, p. 37
28. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1958, p. vii
29. Hone, Joseph. W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. 1942, p.106
30. Fraser, G.S. The Modern Writer and His World. England: Pelican Books, 1967, p. 36
31. Nathan, Leonard E. The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1965, p.51
 



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