Love them or hate them, the Imagists were a group of poets who knew how to conjure up concrete images particularly well. Although it’s often difficult to determine precisely what an Imagist poem is, in the early years it was quite clearly outlined by Ezra Pound’s A few don’ts.
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), more commonly known as H.D., is one of my favourite Imagist poets. She had the gift of presenting detailed images to evoke a vivid effect in the reader. ‘Evening’ is no exception to that rule.
Of course, H.D. had a complicated relationship with the Imagists. Or rather, a complicated relationship with Ezra Pound (not that many people who knew him didn’t have a complicated relationship with him…). They were lovers in their youth, but Pound eventually fell in love with Dorothy Shakespear.
H.D. captured her thoughts and feelings on her former fiancé in End to Torment: Memoir of Ezra Pound. Despite the ominous sounding title, it’s actually quite a heart-warming account of what started out as a love affair but developed into a life-long poetic friendship.
Her style is very immediate and effective, exceptionally particular in its selection of details, and thus always flows beautifully. It’s a pity she’s occasionally overlooked since her gorgeous sensitivity is something that could also inspire contemporary poets.
Reading ‘Evening’
The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower –
Through the straight-forward title, we are presented with the time of day – obviously – placing us in the evening when the light begins to reach its arms in strange ways throughout the landscape. As H.D. succinctly puts it, the light is reaching ‘from ridge to ridge’, ‘from flower to flower’, giving us the impression of how the light connects everything. It gives you a sense of movement, as the light ‘passes’, rather than ‘shines’, which is also evoked by the repetition of the phrase, ‘from x to x’.
the hypaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint –
H.D. gives us more detail to evoke the tangible image. We know that we’re looking at hepaticas (please don’t ask me why she spells them hypaticas), lilac or blue liverleaves. We find them spread across the entire hillside (the ridges from the first lines implicate that it is a hill), and we know that they grow faint as the light darkens.
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.
This beautiful description indicates how the flowers are ‘going to sleep’, in that the flowers wilt and seem to shrink on themselves, moving towards the ‘bluer heart’, a lovely description of how the flower ‘is more itself’ in the centre (around the stigma?). However, the more the flower bends in on itself, the more it becomes ‘lost’ – is this just because it fades from sight in the darkness, or is it that the act of reaching inward means it is dying and losing itself?
The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots –
Here, H.D. presents another plant – the dwarf cornel, but the buds, at this time, are ‘still white’ – immature. As the evening progresses, the ‘shadows dart’ from the roots, making the small flowers look threatened.
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
I love this description and the contrast to the first stanza. The shadow – the black – doesn’t ‘pass’, but it ‘creeps’ from root to root, a more shady and ominous movement than the performance of the light; and the shadows on the grass ‘cut’ each other – as though there are indications that the cornel’s leaves won’t get along.
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.
The final lines of the poem, and a fitting close. In the way that the shadows are cutting each other, they are also seeking each other out. ‘Then both leaf / and leaf-shadow are lost’ could either mean that the shadows become so intermingled that it becomes impossible to distinguish the details of the scenery anymore – or, and more likely because of the progression of light, it becomes so dark that the threatening nature of the shadows disappears from sight.
A few thoughts on analysing ‘Evening’
So, to provide a brief summary: Dusk is imminent, and the light is fading. We’re on a hill where we have hypaticas and cornels. The hypaticas gradually ‘go to sleep’ until there isn’t enough light to make them out anymore. The small cornels, their flowers still immature and innocent, nevertheless throw threatening shadows along the ground.
The most remarkable aspect of the poem is how it not only evokes the passing of time during one evening, as one might assume when first reading the poem, but the passing of time throughout the seasons. The plants have completely different flowering times – so the poem encompasses a much longer time frame than initially expected. Hepaticas blossom in very early spring and wilt completely by the time cornels start breaking into bloom in July to August; the white buds of the cornel wouldn’t appear until early July. H.D. captures these impressions perfectly in a rather short poem!
I’d be rather inclined to avoid interpreting the poem too much and just to suggest that it provides the impression of two plants fading from sight as the light grows dim – one concentrating on an aging flower as it is wilting, the other on a youthful flower as it is being engulfed by shadows.
That being said, the different tone of the stanzas opens a wide range for allegorical interpretations. The fading of the old hypaticas could indicate the decline of Western traditions (supported by the fact that both plants are native to Europe and the U.S.) – a common theme in the 1910s. As evening – time – progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate the blossoms, until we lose sight completely. The petals bending inward to touch the ‘heart’ of tradition also evoke this interpretation – individuals in support of the ‘heart’ of civilisation move closer and closer to the foundations, until they fade entirely from view.
Conversely, the cornel, only just beginning to blossom, appears lost in a threatening atmosphere, where the shadows are creeping from root to root. Does this mean that we cannot make out the danger concretely and that the problem is lying at the root, creeping around and infecting everything in its way without us being able to perceive it? The only thing we can make out is the conflict, seeing how leaf cuts leaf until everything is in darkness.
Read in this way, the poem may recall the insecurities people felt just before the wake of the First World War, with the fading of the light and the disappearance of the plants in the shadows serving as a metaphor to capture the sentiment. The first stanza depicts the coming of age and consequential decay with the plants wilting. Later, we see the potential of shadows, of darkness, consuming something that is unripe. In both cases, we are in the evening, at the end of an era – and the imminence of war casts its shadow across the scene.
But, as is the case with many allegorical readings, this is purely speculative and assumes that we can exchange x for y. Whether my allegorical reading is what H.D. had in mind, or whether it’s just a beautiful impression of an evening at a hilltop throughout the seasons, it’s a beautiful poem. H.D. certainly deserves more attention. Her talent of observation and natural accuracy is absolutely flabbergasting.
Did you enjoy this reading? Got anything else to add? Then please leave a comment below. Otherwise, please do share it on the social media of your choice by clicking on one of the tender buttons below.
*Quoted from H.D., ‘Evening’ in Imagist Poetry, ed. by Peter Jones (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 63.
Flashy, fast-paced and noisy TV shows, films, video games and more dominate our daily intake of entertainment. Coupled with that is the quick exchange of ideas on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Reading, by contrast, is a slow pastime; letting the sentences conjure up a vivid picture in your head can seem particularly cumbersome in comparison, making you feel as though you’re living in slow-motion.
Poetry is even worse. Whereas it is possible to skim prose, skip certain words or even paragraphs, the whole meaning of a poem can be distorted or lost completely when skipped over or taken in too quickly. But poetry surrounds us in our daily lives: whether it be at school or university, via nursery rhymes we teach our children, or even on the daily commute during cultural movements such as Poems on the Underground (provided you’re lucky enough to live in a wonderful city which does such things – beside the constant onslaught of smog).
The result of this clash? The problem is not that poetry is particularly difficult – although it can be – or that poetic language is becoming more archaic by the day – there are plenty of contemporary or nigh-contemporary poets – but that we are gradually, unstoppably, moving towards a society which just doesn’t know how to slow down and take its time to read a poem.
This is a great pity; I would argue that poetry can be enlightening, can teach us about ourselves, can help us feel and experience things otherwise inaccessible to us, and, above all, be fun. But for the reasons named above, I think it might be important to give a rough how-to of poem-reading – and to help you understand it, even if it can appear genuinely difficult.
First of all – why should you bother?
If you’re at school or university, quite simply because it is required of you – but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your own life easier and richer by giving it a fresh shot. For those who are already beyond that stage, it’s more difficult to make a convincing case, of course. You might very well do without poetry in your daily lives. But you might also suggest that you can do without music, films or prose. It’s not about requiring it: it’s about having an additional feed of experience, of joy, an additional pastime you can indulge in. And never forget the origin of many modern songs or film scripts – they themselves are rooted in poetry. Poetry, being the source, is often more passionate, well thought-out, well-structured, and basically more enjoyable than other pastimes, once you’ve gotten used to it. It requires patience, yes. But it is a patience worth persevering in for the sake of appreciating an additional form of art– and once you’ve overcome the initial hurdle it’s completely worth it. I promise. So let’s make ourselves slow down, take time to breathe, and enjoy the pleasures of poetry (unless you’re a poetry nerd from the start – then you’re probably good to go anyway)!
Read the poem aloud, and read slowly
While this might seem like an easy step, it’s surprising how many people just ignore it. Poetry is often written with the sound in mind; working with many sonic devices like rhyme or metre, a poem needs to be heard, rather than read. By reading it out aloud you start appreciating the technique of the poem, rather than treating it like any other piece of writing. In this step, don’t bother about meaning. Instead, try to hear the echoes in the sound or the regularities of the poem’s rhythm. Some pieces of poetry do away completely with sense and focus more on the sound of the rhythm; Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry or Gertrude Stein’s work fall into this category. Reading aloud is really an essential step and the first one to take when trying to get to grips with a difficult poem. If you’re as unfortunate as I am and have the voice of a turtle making love, you can also use YouTube to find recordings by actors or use Pennsound which contains a large database of poets reading their own work. The point is: listen!
Read it again, ignoring line endings to get the sense of the sentences
Some people with little experience with poetry tend to treat the line breaks as though they constitute an entire sentence in its own right. That is not the case, however. Rather, they indicate pauses or breaths to be taken in between the individual lines. It also provides an effect of emphasising the last word in the line. But it usually doesn’t indicate the end of a sentence, although, sometimes, the last word of a line coincides with the last line of the sentence. The idea in this step is to ignore entirely the existence of lines, but only to concentrate on the sentences to get the pure prosaic meaning of the poem. In an easy poem this is probably not necessary, but if it’s highly complex in its syntax or rhetoric then this can help understand the poem. Try to understand the gist and don’t pay attention to the way the poem is broken up.
Look up words you don’t understand
This one should also be a given, but many people don’t seem to do it. In an age where most of us have immediate access to computers, smartphones or tablets, it really shouldn’t be much of an effort just to type the word into google and voilà – there you have it. If you get a dictionary app or are at your desktop computer, it shouldn’t take more than 5-10 seconds per word – and, who would’ve thought, it helps you understand the poem. Of course, the more exotic the diction of a given poem, the more annoying it can get; if a poem has dozens of words unknown to you, you might wish to see if you can gather the meaning from the context, while googling the ones which seem essential but aren’t evident from the text. If there aren’t that many, then there’s really no excuse for laziness – or pride, for that matter.
Paraphrase the statements of the sentences in a way you understand
This point really helps to get to grips with the poem. Take each sentence on its own – or, if it’s an uncomfortably long sentence, take sections of it – and put it in other words. Just get to the basic, clear meaning of the sentence in isolation without any reference to the other sentences. Quite straight-forward, nothing much to say, and it works wonders. Of course, it doesn’t explain the purpose of the sentence within the wider poem, especially when it’s a particularly difficult one – such as Eliot’s The Waste Land or Pound’s Cantos. But in such cases, it’s questionable anyway to what extent one is meant to understand the whole thing as a comprehensive unit. This step might not tell you why a sentence is in the poem – but it certainly helps you understand the basic meaning.
Pay attention to recurring sounds
This mouse is listening attentively
This point is assisted by the ‘reading aloud’ of the poem. Quite simply, it involves paying attention to recurring sounds within the poem. The most obvious are end-rhymes, where the last word of a line rhymes with the last word of another. But it can also occur within the lines (‘internal’ rhyme), or even echoes of other sorts – such as ‘assonance’, which is when only the vowels rhyme, or ‘consonance’, where only the consonants rhyme. When you hear the echo of a sound in a poem, it is often (though not always!) because the poet is attempting to draw your attention to the connection between the two words, thus emphasising them and bringing them into proximity of one another. One example would be ‘The Burning Babe’ by Robert Southwell. He rhymes ‘good’ with ‘blood’ in reference to Christ, in a connection which, taken in isolation, can quite simply mean that Christ has good blood, without openly stating it. Subtleties like this enhance your understanding of the poem and require nothing but an attentive ear. And an appetite for cheese. I’m sure there’s a study somewhere which claims that eating cheese improves hearing…
Pay attention to the metre: are there irregularities?
To find out more about metre, please see my beginner’s guide. Simply put, the selection of a common metre – such as the iambic pentameter – helps set the basic mood or tone of a poem. Using more uncommon metres – such as the trochee – can mean that the poet is deliberately complicating the tone to create a certain effect, as you can read in my post. Most important, however, are irregularities within a regular metre, because they draw attention to specifics in the poem. Sometimes they are, of course, just there for the sake of avoiding the poem sounding dull and metronomic, and irregularities make it more interesting. The best poets, however, couple the interestingness (according to Microsoft Office that is a word!) with meaning, e.g., replacing the first iambic foot with a trochaic foot in an otherwise regularly iambic poem can draw attention to the first word, or indicate a stronger start within the poem. These observations are never conclusive due to the uncertain nature of prosody, but they can support a theory you might have developed by completing the points above. And, being a good, though new, student of poetry, you have of course followed my advice to the letter so far.
Note recurring themes
By this time, you have a pretty good grasp of the plain meaning of the sentences, have read aloud, you’ve paid attention to the sonic suggestions in the poem’s rhythms and echoes, and you know the meaning of each word. With that you can get a good sense of what the poem’s themes are – in other words, you can get close to ‘what the poem is actually about’. This might be quite simple and straight-forward, might even be indicated by the title, or it can be more submerged, hidden beneath uncertainties in the rhythm and only implied by the speaker of the poem. One example of such a cryptic theme would be Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: on the surface, it’s just about the speaker choosing between two paths. But when considered in light of the whole poem, it seems to be about the importance of making choices in general, and that taking the difficult, less-trodden path can make a great difference. So, by determining the theme you decide what to pay attention to when reading it again, and you use the poem itself to see how it explores that theme.
Don’t assume everything is allegorical
A rose is a rose
Many beginners tend to make the mistake of assuming that everything in every poem is allegorical – that is, to say that x in a poem actually means y. It’s tempting to do: it makes you sound as though you’re ‘getting behind’ what the poet was doing, and as though you’re analysing the poem properly. The fact that most poems deal in metaphors, allegories, similes etc. also makes this seem to be the case. But still: don’t assume you can equate x with y, just because it seems convenient to do. Sometimes a rose is just a rose. It can symbolise love, but it doesn’t have to. By reading a poem AS an allegory you’re forced to make assumptions which might just not be true. Always work with what the text, as a self-contained entity, gives you. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t search for internal metaphors and try to find out for yourself what they could mean – but it does mean that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. You can’t read the mind of a dead poet – or of a living poet, for that matter. Be humble in your assertions and always see if you can prove what you are claiming via the text.
Realise that not all is supposed to have an underlying meaning; some things are there for the pleasure of the exploration
Related to the previous point, sometimes the poet might not have intended to do anything besides providing a vivid description of an object, a person, a landscape etc. In these cases, the allegory-error is particularly egregious. If you’re unsure, the poet may have been trying to write something beautiful, something to be appreciated – in short, art. Poems aren’t riddles; while intentions and more interesting truths can be found in them, they aren’t designed to be untangled, dissected, pulled through the mill, but to be enjoyed. If you’re unsure as to the ‘deeper meaning’ of a poem, why not just enjoy it for its own sake – for the sake of the images, the descriptions, the senses it evokes, the story it tells? There’s no harm in that. Unless you’re writing an essay. Then please, please try to make an argument based on more than the need to find an argument.
Be confident
Some poems are virtually impenetrable, others seem deceptively easy. In either case, you might be tempted to do away with it and just give up. But I’d urge you not to despair: easy poems might truly be easy, and difficult ones, if you follow these steps, can be understood, even if it requires patience or assistance from other sources. It’s perfectly alright to search the internet for background info – it’s not cheating to seek other readings of poems (although you need to be aware that these, too, are just opinions), and it’s certainly helpful to consider the circumstances of the poets you are reading. If you have a theory and you can prove it with the text, there’s no reason to assume you’re not right. And even if you’re wrong and in a discussion, somebody points this out to you (because we all discuss poems with our friends, obviously), this is the best way to learn more about the craft. Just be confident in forming your opinions and testing the waters – certainly a better pastime than shielding yourself from seeking the truth! Also, never forget to have fun with the poems: in most cases, they are meant to be entertaining.
Common complaint: Why don’t poets write clearer?
One common complaint many newbies of poetry have is that poets don’t write clearly. Why don’t they just bloody well say what they mean? This complaint is most common among school students who spend hours (or at least what to them seems like hours) trying to decipher what a poem is about. But it is based on a misconception: poetry isn’t a philosophical/ political essay; its purpose isn’t (at least usually) to convince you of a particular viewpoint or to communicate a proposition, but rather to give you an experience, enable you to feel something, which can be (but need not be) related to a proposition/ viewpoint. A poem is a work of art and should be treated as such; it is not about telling you the idea of a poet who came up with some profound ‘truth’ while sitting on the toilet. If the poet wanted to teach you about something concrete or convince you of his/ her opinion, he/ she would have written an essay or dissertation, not a form which is inescapably and indubitably a form of art.
Closing words
The beauty of these steps is that the more poetry you read and study in this way or otherwise, the quicker you get – and, at some point, you begin instinctively to hear the connections in sound, understand the rhythmical structure, and the way themes might or might not develop. And the better you get at it, the more joy you get out of reading poetry. So just give it a shot – have fun, for heaven’s sake! It won’t hurt too much. I promise. Don’t sue me if it does.
Was something unclear because I sound like an old grump lecturing about a topic nobody cares about? Then please leave a comment so that I can lecture some more and clarify the points; otherwise, if you enjoyed it, please share it on social media by pressing on one of the tender buttons below.
Those of you who write your own poetry probably know the feeling: when you stumble upon a poem which strikes you as so perfect, so beautiful in its simplicity, and so mind-bogglingly eye-opening that you become envious of the poet who dared to create such a piece of paradise on earth.
I got this feeling for the first time when reading Yeats’s ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (originally ‘Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’). Although it isn’t generally considered one of his best work – not that that says much, considering Yeats is often thought to be one of the giants of poetry – it is almost certainly one of his most well-known and much-beloved poems.
And how could this not be the case? The language is straight-forward and simple; the diction is modern and can be read easily by anyone, even if you haven’t studied literature at school or university; the prosody is a simple, but loose iambic tetrameter; the resonances of the repetitions at the line endings carry the poem onwards; and the message is so ordinary, yet gorgeous, that one can’t help but love it as it is.
The poem starts out with a desire most, if not all of us, have dreamt of at some point of our lives: to be rich, to have access to all the beautiful things humans have come up with throughout the ages:
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light
These are the aspects of humanity which reach god-like potential; they are beautiful to behold and so wonderful that one might mistake them for heavenly cloths. In this sublime state, they contain all aspects of human existence – they are the cloths of ‘night and light and the half-light’; that is, they are the cloths of enlightened daytime, melancholic night-time, as well as the mysterious time in-between, the golden twilight. The repetitions of ‘cloths’ and ‘light’ gives us a sense of the urgency of the desire; the speaker is yearning for the possession of these things. But as we discover afterward, our speaker is not selfishly dreaming of possessing riches for him or herself, but, on the contrary, to provide a nameless lover with them:
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
The only reason the speaker wishes to possess the riches is so that he can ‘spread the cloths’ under the feet of the lover; not merely to provide them as a gift, but literally to allow the lover to walk upon the spoils of the speaker’s endeavours – in other words, to give the lover the feeling that he/she is walking upon something so wonderful that it reminds him/her of heaven. But, alas, the speaker doesn’t have these riches:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
The speaker concedes that he/she can only dream of this possibility, only dream of being able to lift the lover to a heaven-like state. And yet, the speaker has spread his/her dreams under the feet of the lover, as though the dreams possess the same qualities as the cloths. Rather than giving the lover the spoils of riches, the speaker has given him/her the same desires, the same dreams, the same wishes that allowed the speaker to conjure up these images in the first place. This spreading of the desire for riches – for heavenly transcendence – is, however, a particularly delicate act, putting the speaker at risk, as we see can see in the final line:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Having revealed his/her deepest desires, the speaker is in a profoundly vulnerable position. The speaker is at the mercy of the lover because the lover now knows the deepest driving-force in the speaker’s life – the reason the speaker lives for, so to speak. This is a vote of confidence in the lover, but also demonstrates the deep longing the speaker has for him/her.
It is astonishing how much Yeats manages to put into these eight lines. He gives us love and melancholy, poverty and riches, wishes and dreams, the pain of unfulfilled desire, and the vulnerability of confessions. It is a poem which not only convinced me of Yeats’s genius when first reading it but was actually one of the poems which awoke in me my love for poetry. An astonishing accomplishment, even by Yeats’s standard.
A lovely recording of the great Sir Anthony Hopkins reading the poem:
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*from W.B. Yeats, Yeats’s Poems, ed. by A. Norman Jeffares (New York: Palgrave, 1996), p. 108.
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), more commonly known as H.D., is one of my favourite Imagist poets. She had the gift of presenting detailed images to evoke a vivid effect in the reader. ‘Evening’ is no exception to that rule.
This beautiful description indicates how the flowers are ‘going to sleep’, in that the flowers wilt and seem to shrink on themselves, moving towards the ‘bluer heart’, a lovely description of how the flower ‘is more itself’ in the centre (around the stigma?). However, the more the flower bends in on itself, the more it becomes ‘lost’ – is this just because it fades from sight in the darkness, or is it that the act of reaching inward means it is dying and losing itself?
The most remarkable aspect of the poem is how it not only evokes the passing of time during one evening, as one might assume when first reading the poem, but the passing of time throughout the seasons. The plants have completely different flowering times – so the poem encompasses a much longer time frame than initially expected. Hepaticas blossom in very early spring and wilt completely by the time cornels start breaking into bloom in July to August; the white buds of the cornel wouldn’t appear until early July. H.D. captures these impressions perfectly in a rather short poem!
Flashy, fast-paced and noisy TV shows, films, video games and more dominate our daily intake of entertainment. Coupled with that is the quick exchange of ideas on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Reading, by contrast, is a slow pastime; letting the sentences conjure up a vivid picture in your head can seem particularly cumbersome in comparison, making you feel as though you’re living in slow-motion.
