"The Man He Killed," by Thomas Hardy

The Orthodoxy of Imagery

Once the Imagist movement, free verse, and Modernism hit Poetry a hundred years ago (or so), the image became the defining element of poetry. If you're writing a poem, the one thing you have to have in there is imagery--words that create images in the readers' minds; that's the conventional wisdom. It's also pretty good wisdom--"No ideas but in things," as W.C. Williams put it. Or, when in doubt, write something that will make a picture.

At the same time, poets should resist orthodoxy, even if the orthodoxy is good advice 90% of the time. There's no need to fear abstract language as if it were a disease, for example; and sometimes poetry is made good and even great by language that doesn't convey imagery. So, yes, the Imagists, et al., were on the right track, but there's never only one track in poetry.

Here are some favorite image-free lines from poems that have endured:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" --from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the opening line. What a great way to open a poem! Yo, Shake, well done! The line is "spoken" to someone, a "thee," but it also sets a task for the poet. Now, we readers might associate "summer's day" with imagery of our own, but the line itself contains no imagery. But what a great line of poetry. It is image-free but rhetorically interesting.

"The world is too much with us/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." --Wordsworth's famous poem, of which the first line is the title. No image here, but splendid lines of poetry.

More lines from Wordsworth, these from "Resolution and Independence," stanza 6:

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, so for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

Nice stanza! The speaker is confessing to having been something of a privileged, passive optimist, and he follows the confession with a great rhetorical question.

And the famous lines from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty./ That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." A droll reader might respond that he or she also needs to know how to use public transit, a toothbrush, and--these days--an ATM, but that droll reader would also be a smart-aleck. Anyway, Keats's lines will last longer than that urn did!

from Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," stanza 3:

My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

"Smothering weight" is close to being an image, but it isn't an image. It's general--but it nonetheless conveys a feeling we often have when we are dejected. And there's something fine about the direct observation, "My genial spirits fail." I prefer that to an image Coleridge might have reached for. And I sure like his use of iambic meter here.

from Thomas Hardy, "Hap," the first stanza:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing.
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Hardy's writing a theological poem of sorts, and this stanza expresses a preference for a vengeful god over no god at all. The sense, the rhythm, the phrasing, and the rhyme carry the lines--without imagery. But what a great presence of "voice" these lines have, and the lines set up Hardy's theological "problem" well.

Here are some lines of despair from a poet who most certainly did believe in God, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

The idea, the voice, and Hopkins's great sense of sound carry these lines. The lines do not, strictly speaking, convey images, but they're nonetheless specific--and riveting.

Some famous image-less lines from Yeats's "The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

To be fair to Yeats and the orthodoxy of imagery, the poem does famously end with a sphinx-like beast that "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be be born[.]" Now that is quite an image.

And a poem from Langston Hughes, called "Motto":

I play it cool and dig all jive.
That's the reason I stay alive.
My motto, as I live and learn,
Is Dig, and be Dug, in return.

These lines are funny, warm, and generous; a voice you want to hear speaks through them; and they're rhythmic. --No imagery, per se, but what a terrific poem.

So the question for poets and readers of poets is not "Imagery or abstraction?" Poets may use both, and a more pressing question is this: "Is the language--whether it conveys an image or not--interesting--does it engage the reader?" Poets would do well to lean on imagery early and often, but they would also do well to follow their instincts, even if their instincts tell them just to "say something." The something may not have an image, but it may still work, for a variety of reasons. If it doesn't work, 0ne can always rewrite it (even after it's published, as W.H. Auden famously did, much to the objection of scholars and critics), and maybe an image in its place will indeed be better.

Hardy on War

Here is a poem by Thomas Hardy about war. It is grim and ironic: precisely what one turns to Hardy's novels and poems expecting to find:

The Man He Killed

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like--just as I--
Was out of work--had sold his traps--
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

A "nipperkin," by the way, is (according to the OED online):

"A small vessel used as a measure for alcoholic liquor, containing a half-pint or less."

Because they would have gotten the nipperkin wet, one might have guessed that the nipperkin was something like a napkin. "Nipperkin" can also refer to the ale or liquor in the vessel. So if you said, "May I have a nipperkin of bourbon?" and the bartender were to understand what you said, s/he would give you a certain amount of bourbon, not the nipperkin itself to take home.

As with many men and women who serve in the U.S. military, these two men enlisted because they didn't know what else to do and/or were out of work. The speaker speculates that the other man may have, like him, "sold his traps"--probably referring to fishing-traps or crab-traps. Then suddenly the two men are opposing each other on a battlefield in a war not of their making. As in Wilfred Owen's famous "Dulce et Decorum Est," there is no note of patriotism or even passion in the killing. It is accidental in the sense that two soldiers more or less wander into their respective armies and by chance oppose each other one day. If fate had gone another way, they might have had some beers together in a bar. There is more than a little of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in his poem. It also brings to mind a film with Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin, Hell in the Pacific, wherein an American and a Japanese soldier are stranded, by accident, on the same small island.

I wonder how many of those serving in Iraq now have a similar perspective on their circumstance.

Stood Up

Stood Up

The fiction and poetry of British writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) often projects a bleak, dour attitude toward experience, not unlike the attitudes represented in the works of A.E. Housman and Robinson Jeffers. Of course, those who favor a Hardy/Housman/Jeffers worldview might quibble with the word “bleak” and suggest replacing it with “accurate.” Even so, “dour” seems an especially good word to situate near Hardy, partly because it apparently shares etymological DNA with “duress” and “endure.”

Hardy could be a delicate writer, too—delicate in the way a jeweler, or a diplomatic envoy during a crisis, is paid to be. Consider the love poem, of sorts, “A Broken Appointment”:

A Broken Appointment

You did not come,

And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.

Yet less for loss of your dear presence there

Than that I thus found lacking in your make

That high compassion which can overbear

Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake

Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,

You did not come.

You love not me,

And love alone can lend you loyalty;

--I know and knew it. But, unto the store

Of human deeds divine in all but name,

Was it not worth a little hour or more

To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came

To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be

You love not me?

(The first and last lines of each stanza are supposed to be indented and centered in relation to the rest of their stanzas, but the blog won't let me save the text that way.)

I find so much to like in this poem. Uncommonly, it explores a common experience, that of waiting for someone we care about and whom we want to believe cares about us, only to realize the person has chosen not to show up.

I admit the syntax in stanza one is front-loaded; that is, we must wait quite a while for that verb, “grieved.” Why did he grieve, however? The answer is delicate, discerning. He grieved not because he longed for the person, or because he was wounded by rudeness or abandonment, but because he realized the person’s character ("make," as in "makeup" or "constitution") lacked “high compassion.” The person lacks something that Hardy attempts to capture in a word that welds together two words: “lovingkindness”; the person’s character seems not to include a crucial type of kindness.

Delicately, Hardy writes “You love not me,” instead of “You love me not.” I take “You love me not” to place the emphasis on the speaker’s not being loved. “You love not me” is more detached, less self-centered; it states that the person expected at that appointed hour does not love the one waiting but no doubt loves another or others. In this chosen phrasing, I hear an echo of "that's the way it goes," of "c'est la vie." The phrasing also suggests that this situation is not a surprise to the one waiting. Incidentally, after we have waited for 13 lines, we learn for sure the person is “a woman.”

The poem appears to conclude with a rhetorical question, a kind of question we often ask when we are hurt or angry. A well worn example is, “What were you thinking?!” The one in the poem is more delicate. Indeed, I’m not sure if it expresses, rhetorically, disappointment and anger, or whether, in fact, it may not be entirely rhetorical. That is, perhaps the speaker actually wants to know whether the woman may not have found some worth in showing up and soothing him, the worth one finds in doing the right thing. That the question might function dually pleases me.

The speaker seems not to have expected an expression of love or an indication of loyalty. Basically, he just wanted her to show up, bringing with her a kind word.

I need not but will point out the deftly handled form: iambic pentameter, book-ended in both stanzas by iambic dimeter; an intricate scheme of rhyming; a tone of voice—at least insofar as I interpret the tone—that is, certainly, formal but also conversational. But who talks like that? That’s a fair question. A person who has worked out an elaborate but firm notion of good character may talk like that, and perhaps also an educated person born in 1840 and still alive a decade after the Great War.

Finally, I must mention "the hope-hour," from the penultimate line in stanza one. Haven't we all experienced "the hope-hour," in which, like the people stuck in Casablanca, we "wait . . . and wait. . . and wait"?