Images

The Robert Hass quotation about Images from "The Poet's Companion" handout really caught my attention. The part about images haunting one is true, I think. Also, the moment where he quotes one of Tu Fu's colleagues, who said, "It's like being alive twice," is pretty powerful. Hass also says "[images] do not say this is that, they say this is."

I think this is essential to poetry. The exploration of images can transmit so much more to a reader than an idea can. Ideas, as Hass says, have "implications outside themselves." Images simply exist; they can be more, but they don't have to be. An image gives your reader a concrete thing to cling to, to focus upon, to think about. The chain reaction that this can cause can be used effectively in poetry.

If, in a poem, one says "freedom," a dozen different readers will get a dozen different thoughts. If one says, "I've heard the lock/Come undone/And seen the paleness/Of skin once beneath shackles," then the image a reader has is of the pale skin and of the fallen shackle, and freedom is suddenly defined instead of just introduced.

Capturing images because they haunt you can be a way to make the meaning behind them clear to other people. Getting an image down is a way of making the image that haunted you become a poem that haunts a reader, and things that haunt us make us think.

-Audrey Guire