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By Root 406 0

with a thing, a concrete term—a field, for example. Field, however, is a general term. This may be any sort of field. But with further description, it becomes more specific. With furrows, it becomes a cultivated field, part of a farm. Now add corn and describe what stage of growth the corn is in. Is it knee-high? Has it tasseled? Is it all broken stalks? The condition of the corn shows us the season without us having to be told. If the field is stubbled with broken stalks, it's after the harvest, autumn. With a dusting of snow between the furrows, it becomes early winter. The power of images rise from particular, relevant details.

We tend to think of images as visual, but in poetic terms, an image is a word or a phrase that presents any sensory details for the reader to experience. They may be visual (sight), auditory (sound), tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste) or any combination of these. Most images affect more than one of our senses. As you read Poems, take in the images, the sensory details. Linger over them. Imagine them, and in your imagining, feel them. Here's a poem by Margot Schilpp, a contemporary poet. Read it slowly. Let your imagination fully experience its images. Let your senses delight in your imagination.

ONE SUNDAY EACH SPRING

So quickly we're transported, the field a

yellow cathedral:

the strict rows of daffodils riffle up a

pollen breeze,

the barn yawns another annotation,

and the farmhouse, distant, tiny, props itself

against the sky. Never mind that now the

gentle mounds

are left untilled, or that the farm, idle

for years, produces nothing but the remembrance

of itself. Each April those old bulbs

fracture

again, all the pedicels again support

glorious blooms,

and I am dressed up: pink gingham, patent

leather,

an empty Easter basket slung over my

six-year-old arm.

All the trees pass in furious motion—green

touches glass,

the road narrows to dirt, then dead-end, and

our family

erupts from the car—we spend an hour

working up the rows. See my nose, dusted

yellow,

disappointed again each year when there's no

aromatic reward

from those flowers cultivated for size and

number.

Hear my hands slide down the hollow stalks,

my squeal at the eerie squeak of the stems as I

pull.

Feel the crust of mud caking my mary-janes,

the soles now

moon-boot sized and heavy stepping. Rains

must have moved across the state's southern tip

last night, left the land too wet; we

struggle

to stitch ourselves into the rows, our arms

still

flexing mechanically, a rhythmic clutch and

transfer.

And we find it is enough. The car fills

with a brown

odor of earth top-noted by green and

yellow,

with wet newspaper, with the stems' weepy milk,

and all

of what rises again from the farm, the

disappearing

road, the last uneasy visit to the empty

tomb of that field.

Notice the concrete-specific terms the poem uses: yellow, daffodils, breeze, barn, one quickly after another. The poem is rich with images, and they appeal to all five senses. The images create the scene so well that the reader can smell the soil, feel the wind, hear the squeak of wet flower stems and taste the pollen. The images create the world of the poem so well that the reader walks the rows with the speaker on this spring Sunday.

Images are not simply decoration. They aren't simply descriptions of things. What a poem shows, and how the poem shows it, imparts meaning, both emotional and intellectual. It creates overtones. It suggests. The first line of "One Sunday Each Spring" does just that in the phrase "the field a yellow cathedral," which is also a metaphor (as you'll see in chapter six, similes and metaphors rely on well-crafted images). It is Sunday, after all, and this visit to the old farm with its "yellow cathedral" is a sort of worship, a pilgrimage. It's a holy experience, a reverent farewell.

The imagery of "One Sunday Each Spring" is lush and highly descriptive, but some poems work better with starker, leaner images. This poem by Tim Geiger, another contemporary poet, has a completely different