Esoteric imagery in some modern English poems

The poets not only use metaphors, their poems are metaphors .       .         . -     . v - .                  K. Hewitt

This article is devoted to the problem of interpretation of esoteric imager)' in modern English poetry. The notion 'imagery' refers to words in a figurative meaning. There are lots of cases when poetic imagery requires special interpretation and deep analysis - these are the cases of language esotericism. In poetry esotericism, as a system of hidden philosophic thoughts about the essence of phenomena, can be revealed through corresponding interpretation of poems. We use the tam 'esoteric' in the indirect meaning: an unusual metaphor, compari son of objects or phenomena in a metaphor, something implicit that can be decoded only in the process of the analysis of imagery.

Among the basic concepts of English poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have singled out the concept of 'death' which is a source of esoteric imagery. The review of the concept 'death' in English poetry of this period is carried out using material from An .Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry edited by K.Hewitt and V.Ganin and from English poems of the modernistic tradition.

In some poems of the Anthology the concept 'death' is implied, encoded; in others this topic is explicitly given in the title, which prepares the reader for facing this concept beforehand, in W.H. Auden’s Tuneral Blues' the usage of the adjective 'funeral' in combination with the noun 'blues' on the one hand calls up associations with the word combination 'funeral/dead march' and on the other hand the title makes the reader understand that we hear the music of grief and loss, which is created for the author from the variety of components. In Philip Larkin’s 'An Arundel Tomb' the denotative meaning of the noun «tomb» firstly makes it clear that the poem concerns a person marked by history and whose name is imprinted in centuries (in this case it’s the Earl of Arundel) and secondly this meaning to a greater degree presupposes philosophic reflection of the person’s fate, of his deeds without too sorrowful or mournful tone. In Charles Tomlinson’s 'Marat Dead' the word 'death' is placed in the title together with a proper name, so that the matter is either about the description of the hero’s death itself, or about the story of the hero’s life together with feelings, emotions and consequences caused by his death; in this poem Tomlinson speaks about Marat - one of the radical Jacobin leaders -the hero of J.L. David’s picture.

The review of the poetic material selected in the Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry gives us an opportunity to perceive the artistic design of this concept and to broaden lexical field of its expression. Firstly, these can be separate lexemes in the poems on different topics: village graves in Tomlinson’s 'The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of Stone'. The poet creates an opposition between 'village graves' and 'village green' in his picture they are separated by a stone construction, which leaves a pass back and forth; these word combinations are alike graphically and phonetically - just a few phonemes turn 'village green' into 'village graves'. The same thing happens in reality - a few seconds may turn life to death and the world of the living (cities, towns, villages, etc.) is separated from the world of the dead (cemeteries) only by a gate in a fence. In Anne Stevenson’s 'In the Tunnel of Summers' we observe the interconnection of the direct meaning cemetery with the connotation of the word 'tunnel' - passing through a long tunnel of time you see deaths of many generations. In T. S. Eliot’s 'La Figlia che Piange' the word combination garden urn is mentioned - a burial urn is set in a cinerarium of a memorial park.

Thirdly, we singled out the cases of ambiguity when a word or word combination used by the poet can express both a meaning connected with death and a neutral one: Thus Larkin’s dead straight miles the one hand realize a colloquial meaning 'absolutely straight rtids. on the other hand there is an actualization of the connotative :: mponent dead - maximum speed which one can gather on a straight : ? =d is a breakneck pace with mortal dangers; it’s an actual realization :: the idiom 'to belt down the road'. Tomlinson’s doom can mean fate :r death. decease, loss; the poet speaks about an important part of the так:sophy of life - wisdom, morality, necessity, awareness, that’s

:;; me context of the poem actualizes both meanings.

A rather unexpected representation of the artistic concept death is shown through its correlation with the concepts beauty. This combination of concepts functions differently; in some cases death transforms, decorates, ennobles: in Tomlinson’s Marat Dead- ugliness has gone - an ugly man, Marat, gains beauty after death, the same happens with inner beauty - the Jacobin leader, bellicose and tyrannical, becomes a general hero who met the death of a martyr. In other cases the poet glorifies the beauty of those who mourn over the dead: T. S. Eliot's 'La Figlia che Piange' — “Lean on a garden urn — Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair”.

A concept has a complicated, multidimensional structure, which includes various connotations, 'concepts are not only conceived but also experienced. They are the objects of emotions, sympathies and antipathies' (Stepanov. Y. Constants: Dictionary of Russian Culture, 2004). The connotation of the concept 'Death' - misfortune, grief, depression - pierce through the poems devoted to the loss of close peo- pie. Tony Harrison in the poem 'Long Distance' painfully describes the reaction of his father to the death of his mother; and then - after the death of the father - the poet understands that he himself doesn’t want :: lose the illusion that his parents have just gone somewhere out, and so that he rewrites their telephone number into his new phone book. Parents’ death in Tony Harrison’s 'Background Material' - mam and red.... both dead-is expressed through an extended esoteric image of a photo, which conceals the author-son; his sorrow and love to the dead parents are revealed through the prosaic description of the pho-re. which keep everyday moments and holidays, they are not of the best quality, but we understand that they are so dear, because only a loving person can keep in his memory such small details - in his, if you look close, the gleam, the light, me in his blind right eye.

Death and revival, resurrection are the motif of the poem 'Musi-::re's Widow' by Anne Stevenson. The observation of this poem from rise point of view of “script”, the set of expectations of what is to come refer the given situation, allows to guess how events shape them-reives and what the further line of behavior prescribed in this situation is. The resolution to overcome grief caused by the death of the husband is an incentive to a new life, to the revival of the woman; the esotericism of imagery consists in the fact that woe caused by death is at riie same time revival - the inner state of the woman is shown by means of the images related to gardening:

And she had to come back as woman to the world, a green-branched seedling of her purpose, need, the life behind her gaping like a seed.

— a new life resembles a sprout that makes its way through the seed. The same metaphoric idea of'resurrection' is expressed in Tomlinson’s 'Curtain Calf by where we witness Death in a dramatic representation - death on the stage:

The dead in their dressing rooms sweat out the sequel through greasepaint and brocade О to have died

On the last note of a motif...

Death here is followed by 'resurrection' at the end of the performance when all the actors take a bow:

... But the applause ■

’ draws them on to resurrection.                          ■■ "

The review of modern English poetry allows us to draw a conclusion that the most frequent metaphoric concept that expresses the idea of death is Nature: the long straw cemetery in the poem of Anne Stevenson 'In the Tunnel of Summers'. In this case the direct meaning of the noun 'cemetery' is included in the metaphoric phrase 'the long straw cemetery' (in its direct meaning - 'a mown field'). Such conceptual inclusion is based on the fact that one of the slots in the frame hay mowing is occupied by the mowing tool - scythe, which is also present in the frame death as a mythological image of death with a scythe - the great reaper. Here 'the long straw cemetery' is metaphorically connected with human death; besides this is a long straw cemetery in the center of which there stands a heroine: the field behind her back is a symbolic cemetery of the generations of ancestors, the field stretching in front of her is a cemetery of the generations of the descendants: ■

They are already building the long straw cemete          -у

■ where my granddaughter’s daughter has been born -у У-1 -у '                                              and buried.

'Death' in the poems under study is represented in respect of real events that have happened to the authors of poetic texts; in the cases mentioned above it is the natural death of relatives. In the poem 'Daffodils' by Ted Hughes, the idea of the wife’s death is not shown distinctly, but here the suicide of Sylvia Plath is implied, she died in February 1963, when there was a record low temperature in England: he would die in the same great freeze; the phrase as you they return to forget drops a hint on the flowers on the graves in memory of the dead.

Violent death as a result of a murder is shown in Tomlinson’s 'Marat Dead'; we come across the 'double representation' of death: the fact of the real murder with all the details and the description of death depicted in J.L. David’s picture.

In the poem 'Refugee Blues' by W. H. Auden we find the :rds 'Hitler ... they must die' - death is shown as terror and mass ruder genocide in the eyes of those who are to be killed; the lives of my people depend on the will of one person, it’s really terrible to -z.assand that you can be killed by the only wish of a tyrant because ; : _ don’t fit in his philosophy of life:

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;

It was Hitler over Europe, saying: "They must die ";

We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.

Here we also find an unusual word combination officially dead: tesh as disparagement and revocation of the right to live - death de ffire — a worldwide jungle of redtape, the conflicts of states, abeyant .egisluon often cause not only the violations of human rights but also Ue total deprivation of rights: If you've got no passport you're offi- СЙ&- dead. W. H. Auden describes the experience of German Jews, refugees in the USA without official documents and that’s why with-ttn civil rights: “We are very sorry but such person does not exist, YOU do not exist”.

In a number of poems the notion death itself acts as a metaphoric —age. For example, Carol Rumens in her 'Simple Poem' compares gating with the beloved person to death, at the same time she ex-nresses a desire that «everything should die because her love's gone forever:

Why doesn't everything die now you 're not here?

The same idea - the desire that everything in this world should die is expressed in the above mentioned poem by W. H. Auden 'Funeral Blues' - “’For nothing now can ever come to any good” - the death of the beloved is perceived as hopelessness, the loss of the pur-ptst of life and as a result the desire that the whole world: celestial bodies, nature, oceans — should die.

To crown it all we can say that the poems we deal with are nota-bte for the esoteric imagery based on the conceptual metaphor, which is in most cases an extended one and is frequently realized within the whole poem. Artistic conceptual metaphors are marked by a distinctive character, by vividness, mysteriousness, sophisticated esoteric imagery; they reflect an individual author’s world view. And the specific character of means and ways of aesthetic representation of the concept “death” in the poems under analysis enables us to speak about the individual author’s originality in the explication of the artistic concept within the individual poetic code.