Elements of Style in Poetry: Imagery, Sound, Syntax and Voice in Keats, Hughes and Tagore

Hook: the same idea, three ways

Autumn is nice. My people are old and wise. I hope my country becomes free. All three sentences are true to the poems you will read today, and all three are completely forgettable.

The poets you will meet said these things in ways that are still read a hundred or two hundred years later. The difference is style: word choice, imagery, sound and sentence structure. This lesson is about how style turns an idea into an experience.

Poem 1: John Keats, To Autumn (written 1819, published 1820; public domain)

John Keats (1795 to 1821) was an English Romantic poet who died of tuberculosis at 25. To Autumn is often called one of the most perfect short poems in English. Here is the first of its three stanzas:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Glossary: conspiring = secretly planning together; thatch-eves = the edges of a straw roof; gourd = a squash-like fruit; clammy cells = the sticky honeycomb cells.

Style at work:

• Personification and apostrophe: Autumn is addressed as a person, a bosom-friend of the sun, conspiring with it. The two seasons' forces are partners in ripening.
• Sensory imagery: mostly visual and tactile (heavy, swelling, clammy), with taste suggested by sweet kernel.
• Sound: soft m and l sounds (mists and mellow) slow the reading, like a warm, drowsy afternoon. Lines are crowded with stressed words (To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells), so they feel heavy and full.
• Syntax: the whole stanza is one long, unfinished sentence of to-phrases. It never reaches a main verb, so it keeps adding, just like the season.
• Tone: calm, rich, appreciative. Later stanzas acknowledge that autumn leads to winter, but the poem never mourns; it values this season for itself.

Poem 2: Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921; public domain)

Langston Hughes (1901 to 1967) was a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African American art, music and literature centred in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s. He wrote this poem as a teenager, and it was published in The Crisis magazine in 1921. (The word Negro was a standard, respectful term in the 1920s; today, Black or African American is used.)

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Style at work:

• Collective voice: the I bathes in the Euphrates in ancient times and hears the Mississippi in the 1800s. No single person could do that. The speaker is the soul of a people, across thousands of years of history.
• Anaphora: I bathed... I built... I looked... I heard... gives the poem the rhythm of a chant or testimony.
• Simile and symbol: My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Rivers are ancient, life-giving and continuous: a symbol of a deep, unbroken heritage.
• Imagery and transformation: the Mississippi, a river linked to the slave trade (Lincoln's trip to New Orleans is often connected to his seeing enslaved people sold there), has a muddy bosom that turns all golden in the sunset. Painful history is not erased, but it is transformed into beauty and dignity.
• Refrain and structure: the poem begins and ends with I've known rivers and My soul has grown deep like the rivers, framing the history like riverbanks.

Poem 3: Rabindranath Tagore, Where the mind is without fear (Gitanjali 35, English version 1912; public domain)

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941), a Bengali poet, musician and thinker from Kolkata, India, translated many of his own poems into English as Gitanjali (Song Offerings). In 1913 he became the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he wrote this poem, India was ruled by Britain, and many readers hear in it a hope for a free and just India.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Style at work:

• Anaphora: seven lines begin with Where, each adding one condition of a free society.
• Periodic sentence: the main clause, let my country awake, is held back until the very last line. The build-up creates suspense and longing.
• Metaphor: reason is a clear stream that can get lost in the dreary desert sand of dead habit; prejudice is narrow domestic walls that break the world into fragments.
• Tone and address: the poem is a prayer (my Father addresses God), so its tone is hopeful and reverent rather than angry. Its vision of freedom is about the mind as much as about government.