SYMBOLISM

SYMBOLISM

[prepared for students of Indian Universities]

Dr. S. Sreekumar

I. What is a symbol?

The word symbol originates from the Greek word ‘Symbolon’ meaning ‘mark’, ‘sign’ or ‘token’. The term became popular during the nineteenth century when many discussions took place as to its exact meaning. But it proved elusive as critics and creative writers could not give an exclusive significance to it. The situation continues thus even today as Rene Wellek points out: “The term is highly ambiguous and shifting”. Not only that, it has even acquired mutually contradictory meanings. Its uses in “symbolic logic” and “mathematical symbol” are contrary to its use in “poetic symbol”.

However, the practitioners of the Symbolist Movement of the nineteenth century gave the term various definitions mostly suited to their needs or outlooks. Yeats, for example, called symbol “a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame”. Pound asserted that symbol alone presented intellectual and emotional complexities “in an instant of time”. Arthur Symons believed that the use of symbol was an attempt to express “an unseen reality”. To select one particular definition among the numerous offered may prove a difficult task for any student of literature. Hence it is better to follow the one offered by The Concise Oxford Dictionary which defines the symbol as “a thing conventionally regarded as typifying, representing, or recalling something especially an idea or quality (white is a symbol of purity).

Symbols are of various types. Some are “conventional” or “public”. For example, words like “the cross” or “the Good Shepherd” indicates more than what they signify. These are “public” symbols in certain cultures. Then there are “private” symbols. To this category belong the numerous symbols used by poets like Yeats. Yeats has made repeated use of symbols like “gyre”, “tower”, “winding stair” and “Byzantium”. He according to C. M. Bowra, even turned human beings into symbols. Bowra says that Yeats saw Synge (the Irish dramatist) as a symbol of naturalness, of nearness to common life. Yeats also used two other types of symbols which he called ‘emotional symbol’ and ‘intellectual symbol’. ‘Emotional symbols evoke emotions alone whereas intellectual symbols evoke ideas alone. Yeats says that ‘white’ or ‘purple’ may evoke emotions “but if I bring them into the same sentence with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty”.

II. The Symbolist Movement

Symbolism is a late nineteenth century movement in art and literature. It is a systematic exploitation of symbols for artistic purposes. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines symbolism as “the use of symbols to represent ideas—an artist and poetic movement or style using symbols and indirect suggestion to empress ideas, emotions etc”.

III. Characteristics of the Symbolist Movement

1. The Symbolist Movement was basically mystical. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, French literature was dominated by groups called Realists and Parnassians. Realists like Zola presented ruthless pictures of contemporary social life. The Parnassians led by Leconte de Lisle looked for impersonality, technical perfection and pictorial qualities in poetry. Both Realists and Parnassians had no use for mysticism. Against the scientific realism of the Realists and the objectivity of the Parnassians the symbolists protested. The Symbolists believed in an ideal world which was more real than that of the senses. It was also a world of beautiful things. “The essence of Symbolism”, says Bowra, “is its insistence on a world of ideal beauty and its conviction that this is realized through art”.

2. The symbolists avoided public and political themes. They thought only about ideal beauty. Hence politics was an alien theme for them. The symbolists also disliked realistic and scientific view of art which the Parnassians preferred.

3. They also rejected sociological and ethical themes as they believed that art must follow sensations of beauty.

4. The symbolists had great regard for the musical element in poetry. Paul Valery thought that music was a way “to express the inexpressible” All the symbolists accepted Poe’s definition of a poem as rhythmic creation of beauty. They also believed that through music they could add mystery to poetry thus fulfilling their avowed aim. Their love of Wagner’s music made them try to approximate the same in poetry. However their love of music led them astray and made their poetry obscure. Mallarme was obsessed with his aim of approximating his poetry to Wagner’s music. He forgot that fact that poems use words and that words have their own limitations. Words are limited by their meanings and Mallarme’s aim was doomed to failure. Walter Peter said “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music”. Mallarme and other took it too literally. This is a great defect in the symbolist poetry.

5. The symbolist poets aspired to make poetry as much mystical as possible. They wanted to liberate poetry from vulgar emotions by concentrating on private visions. Mallarme and others viewed their age as hostile to poetry and they hated the public of their times. But their attempts to isolate themselves from the common man led to an isolation of their poems themselves from common life. The public, when they found that they were hated and that the new poetry was beyond their understanding, turned to cruder writers. The poets lost the strength they could have derived from the common man. They thought only about the future and neglected the present; the present too ignored them. Their poetry lacked the vitality which human touch would have given it. No wonder that Mallarme, in spite of years of hard and sincere toil, failed to produce his “oeuvre pure”, his masterpiece which he had dreamed for more than twenty years.  

6. The symbolists made use of several types of imagery. Sometimes these images came from their private visions. Yeats, for example, used the images of the phases of the moon to suggest cycles of history. Frequent use of such symbols made the poems obscure and drove the common man more and more away from the poems themselves.

7. Symbolism crossed the borders of France and influenced many writers. Influence of the French symbolists can be traced in the works of Arthur Symons, Walter de la Mare, Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats (from Britain), Stephen George and Rilke (from Germany), Alexander Blok (from Russia), Amy Lowell, H.D., Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, E.E.Cummings and Wallace Stevens (from America). After 1900, Symbolist Movement withered because its excessively ornamented art form was distasteful to the reading public. Nevertheless Eliot, Pound, Yeats were its great gifts to English Literature.

IV. W.B.Yeats

Arthur Symons, the propagandist of Symbolism in England, called Yeats “the chief representative of that movement in our country”. Yeats did not regard poetry as complete in itself. He viewed it always as a means of communication with the spiritual world which is there behind the visible. He regarded the poet as a medium, as an interpreter of the unseen.

Yeats developed his ideas of symbolism not from the French, their language he could hardly read. He depended more on Blake and Shelley. Magic and painting also played a role in making him a symbolist. Yeats believed that an image becomes a symbol only within a tradition. The tradition may be that of literature or religion or folk tales. Similarly a symbol is never exhausted. It may take more than a generation for it to exhaust itself.

In the poems of Yeats we come across many unusual symbols. The golden bird that sits on a golden bough, the rough beast with a lion’s body and the head of a man, the moon with its twenty-eight phases are some such symbols. The swan is a popular symbol in Yeats. It stands for youth, passion, and conquest. The rose in his poems represents beauty, harmony, love, nature and its fair petals stand for four elements—Earth, Air, Water and Fire.

However, the winding stair and the tower are two symbols special to Yeats’s poetry. The winding stair stands for the winding path of life. The tower calls to mind his  residence at Thoor Ballylee and the towers from which men sought wisdom. Thus the symbols in Yeats have different meanings according to their context.

V. T. S. Eliot

Eliot was very much influenced by the French symbolist La Forgue. He followed the techniques of La Forgue in his early poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Eliot’s use of images was in the model of the French poet Baudelaire.

In his masterpiece, “The Waste Land”, Eliot used symbols like fire and water. Many symbols in this poem—the dead tree, the rock, dry bones etc.—are taken from the Bible. Eliot’s use of recurring symbols enriched the poem.

Dr. S. Sreekumar