POEM: FORGIVING LIGHT

Forgiving Light

(with thanks to

William Carlos

Williams)

Pale winter morning

after the snow squall.

Little red trucks

still on their way.

I WROTE THIS A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, the morning after a snow squall here in town, when the main street was practically deserted. I don’t know if I saw a red truck or not, but I made sure there was one there any way. The light that morning had a pale, overcast, yellowish glow that somehow was very gentle and comforting in contrast with the stormy weather of the previous evening. The illustration was done years earlier, back in the day. 

The above is my humble tip-of-the-hat to imagist poetry and the American poet, William Carlos Williams, and his 1923 imagist-inspired poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

And, of course, Ezra Pound’s 1911 poem, arguably the most famous in all of imagist poetry:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Imagism, part of the modernist literary movement, was an early twentieth century response to the romanticism of the Nineteenth Century; an attempt to break from “Georgian” poetry and what its proponents saw as “facile and loose”, “mannerly” and overly “ornamented” writing. Imagist poets desired to pare the poem down to an essential image that was free from any—they felt—unnecessary “flourishes, ornamentation or descriptions. They wanted to eliminate the poet from the poem to “deliver it as objectively as possible.” The poem needed to be strongly visual and as concrete as possible; abstractions, and conventions such as similes were to be avoided.  The main objectives of imagist poetry, according to Sukhmett Kaur* were:

 -To employ the language of common speech, preferring the exact word to the merely decorative.

-To create new rhythms, including free verse, as the expression of new moods.

-To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

-To replace vague descriptions by an exact image.

-To effect the utmost economy in the use of words.

Imagist poetry was in vogue for the early decades of the Twentieth Century, and as part of the “modernist” movement in literature and the arts, it facilitated a revaluation of early forms of poetic expression that brought in a more “precise and focused” type of poetics. Its influence waned following World War I, and early elements of poetic expression regained their legitimacy. While perhaps a necessary form of ‘shock therapy’, to the art of poetic expression, Kaur nevertheless concludes: “Fundamentally, Imagism was a recall to economy and discipline, but it was too restrictive to endure long as a concerted movement.”

* Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature,

RR Bawa DAV College for Girls, Batala, Punjab, India

Article from:

BEST: International Journal of Humanities, Arts,

Medicine and Sciences (BEST: IJHAMS)

ISSN (P): 2348-0521, ISSN (E): 2454-4728

Vol. 4, Issue 5, May 2016, 65-68