The 'Pharmeikṓn’ - An Ecological Image in Imagist Poetry 

For M.H Abrams, ‘Imagism’ simply was ‘a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even more vigorously in America, approximately between the years 1912 and 1917,’ (173). It is thus the movement’s very inability to endure over time that finds itself as the locus of critical discourse, with scholars outlining a plethora of causes behind its brief life-span, from its highly restrictive nature to its internal contradictions. Critic Vincent Sherry particularly emphasises the movement’s ‘indeterminate’ identity resulting in poetic works that appeared ‘more as a miscellany than a coherence.’ (787) Sherry further elucidates the term itself, 'Imagism,’ to signify a falsehood, as its poetry resonated more with the Symbolist’s preoccupation with musicality than in rendering a visual image. In justification of this claim, Sherry refers to F.S Flint’s essay ‘Imagisme’ which appeared in 1913, and its delineation of the conditions of Imagist poetry:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. (129)

While Flint’s third point does stress on ‘rhythm,’ he does not ameliorate its significance in comparison to the previous two conditions. Furthermore, the final criterion only states for the writer to not compose ‘in the sequence of a metronome,’ but does not define what it means by a ‘musical phrase’. For Hegel, musicality would denote a succession of moments in time. If this is true, then although the idea of temporality does contradict Ezra Pound’s expounding of ‘direct treatment’ of the subject matter in a single instance, the contradiction does not negate, like Sherry suggests, Imagism’s objective to convey an image. Rather, this tension between dualities, of movement and inertia, of succession and atemporality, of forms: music and painting, creates a gap in which the ‘pharmeikṓn’ exists and dismantles these oppositions. Writing as ‘pharmeikṓn’ consequently then is intertwined with the poetic form as Hegel asserts poetry to be ‘the totality, which unites in itself […] the two extremes, i.e. the visual arts and music,’ (960). It is to note, however, that the word ‘unite’ is precarious in regards to the relationship between stasis and immediacy in the imagist poem, perhaps then ‘manifests’ or ‘amalgamates’ would act as a necessary supplement as either word would not suggest the promise of resolution or harmony.

But the question still remains, how can writing signify an image? Ezra Pound in his seminal ‘A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste’ defines an ‘image’ to be:

[…] that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. […] It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. (130)

From an eco-critical perspective, in such an image, the Kantian notions of space and time would become dissolved, opening up possibilities to von Uexküllian ‘worlds’ that reside beyond human phenomenological capacities. An ‘image’ here would act as a gateway, a bridge, into more-than-human worlds, subverting anthropocentric usages of language by inverting ‘nature’ as background to ‘nature’ as foreground. Andrew Hay affirms, ‘The image should not, in Pound’s view, be purely representational and should not correspond directly to its visual referent,’ only to subsequently pose the question, ‘but can a poetic image so consistently associated with visuality — as in Imagist theory — ever escape the mimetic?’ (308) Hence, re-reading imagist poetry through an eco-critical gaze, as ‘pharmeikṓn,’ enables us the interpret the linguistic shift from mimesis to diegesis, in response to the exigency of our contemporary context as Irmgard Emmelheinz claims:

[…] images of the Anthropocene are missing. [… And that] although it is relayed by the optic nerve, the picture does not make an image. In order to make images, it is necessary to make vision assassinate perception; to ground vision, and then to perform (as in artistic activity) and think vision as a critical activity. (138)

A much overlooked poet of the imagist ‘vogue’ is Richard Aldington, whose poetry opens the first anthology to the movement, ‘Des Imagistes’ (1914). The image evoked by his poem, ‘The River’ exemplifies the ‘pharmeikṓn,’ —

                            The River

                                    I

                     I drift along the river
                     Until I moored my boat
                     By these crossed trunks.

                    Here the mist moves
                    Over fragile leaves and rushes,
                    Colourless waters and brown fading hills.

                    She has come from beneath the trees,
                    Moving within the mist,
                    A floating leaf. 

                                  II

                     O blue flower of the evening,
                     You have touched my face
                     With your leaves of silver. 

                      Love me for I must depart. 
 

An unprescribed convention of Imagist poetry seems to establish the principle visual of the image through its title (for example see Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ or H.D’s ‘Sea Rose’). Thus, the title of Aldington’s poem, ‘The River’ presupposes the ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,’ which the text through a severe economy of words will manifest. However, as the Imagist finds the ‘line’ fundamental in concisely conveying the image, it is to note that the definite article, ‘the’, is used to limit the image to a particular. However, in the absence of an adjective or another noun, the spatiality of the river is unknown. The image of a river is not ‘anchored’ (Barthes) to a particular geographic signification. This corresponds to Pound’s emphasis that precision does not translate into mimesis as:

Imagisme is not symbolism […] The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra. (Vorticism, 461)

The presence of an article which demarcates the limitations of the image is then followed by an absence, the particular is deferred.  A similar instance unfolds regarding temporality, as although the opening stanza ‘I drifted along the river/ Until I moored my boat/ By these crossed trunks,’ establishes a perceiving agent ‘I’ whose gaze is positioned to orient our phenomenological understandings of the image, no word is used to indicate the subjectivity of the speaker. Rather, a simple causal sequence is established — the speaker drifts, then moors his boat near the ‘crossed trunks’. Yet the time which has elapsed in-between these events is unclear. Whether we are in the morning, afternoon, or evening, we do not know. We do not know how the speaker feels in finally halting his boat on the river, nor how long he has been on the river in the first place before arriving at this exact location. Atemporality governs the first stanza.

However, in the second stanza, ‘Here the mist moves/ Over fragile leaves and rushes,/ Colourless waters and brown fading hills,’ deep vowel sounds of the assonance coupled with the sibilance create an illusion of a succession of moments in time. We are met with a spatial diaxis ‘Here’ — which changes the previous stanza’s tense from past simple to present continuous, providing an agency to the ‘mist’ which ‘moves’. In the second line the proposition ‘over’ clarifies spatiality, however after ‘rushes’ there is a comma, a pause. The movement of the mist is lapsed, as the background is brought directly to the fore. Adjectival imagery is used for the first time, ‘colourless waters and brown fading hills’. The hills are not verdurous and lush, they are ‘brown’ and ‘fading,’ — Romantic assumptions about the landscape’s ethereal beauty are subverted. The water, furthermore, is ‘colourless’. It is not dull, nor murky — but rather it is without colour altogether. The first adjective thus signifies an absence of colour whilst the latter the presence of one which implies infertility.  Nature does not conform to the aesthetics of either a Kantian or Wordsworthian sublimity.

The third and concluding stanza of the first section, ‘She has come from beneath the trees,/ Moving within the mist,/A floating leaf,’ uses the feminine pronoun ‘she’ to anthropomorphise the object of the speaker’s gaze , ‘a floating leaf’. This is not the first time the speaker has referenced a leaf as the previous stanza personifies the leaves on the ground as ‘fragile.’ This juxtaposition between the leaves which the mist moves ‘over’ and the leaf which is ‘floating’, that is, in the process of falling and thereby is located neither on tree or ground, nor above or below, but in the midst arms of the mist, reveals its spatio-temporal relation to be both amorphous and ambiguous. The masculine speaker is unable to grasp the slippery movement of the feminine leaf, who resides in a liminal space, unravelling the desired stagnancy and ‘directness’ of an image in the very attempt to compose a mimetic rendition. Moreover, whereas the river utilises a determinate article, ‘the’ to assign it to an undefined particular, the indeterminate article ‘a’ attributes a universality to the leaf, a non-particular, which is ironically defined and gendered, and spatially located as ‘within the mist’ and ‘beneath the trees’.

What is curious is that in the second section of the poem, the tone shifts, the impersonality of the speaker is given a specific subjectivity. The first stanza of the second section, ‘O blue flower of the evening,/You have touched my face/ With your leaves of silver,’ commences with an anachronistic apostrophe, a direct address, synonymous with the ode form from the classical tradition. Whereas both the ‘river’ and the ‘leaf’ are isolated images, the flower that is addressed is not. It is the third and most eidetic instance of colour imagery within the poem, the flower is given temporal diaxis ‘evening’ and spatial form ‘blue’. Against the ‘colourless water’ and ‘brown fading hills’ it is starkly contrasted. The second line uses another apostrophe, ‘you,’ this time in second person, no longer anachronistic and much more intimate in its address. The speaker states, ‘you have touched my face’ in a monosyllabic utterance, the event which has transpired is non-negotiable, it is an immediate condition of the moment. The following line ‘with your leaves of silver’ depicts the last moment of colour imagery used within the text. ‘Silver’ evokes several connotations, from the potential falling of ‘moonlight’ to something that is ‘precious’ and full of shine.

The poem’s concluding line, ‘Love me for I must depart,’ uses an imperative tone. The speaker demands the ‘blue flower of the evening,’ to ‘love’ him for the reason that he ‘must depart’.  But the logic behind this causal rational evades us. The necessity of the departure is evident in the use of ‘must’ but the temporality is uncertain - exactly when must the speaker depart? Furthermore, it is in announcing his departure, his absence, that the condition of love is proposed. The flower’s response is marked by the speaker’s impending absence. Andrew Hay explains, ‘The inter-subjective nature of the Imagist poem is thus more suited to a paradoxical notion of the temporal moment as simultaneously present and deferred,’ (319).

Thus the oppositions set up throughout the poem of absence and presence, stillness and succession, subject and object, ‘man’ and nature (feminine), particular and universal, colour and colourlessness, are brought into a play of ‘différance’ in which the origin is constantly deferred by ‘temporization’ — a spacing. Derrida explains,

If the pharmakon is “ambivalent,” it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross into the other. (443)

Therefore the mist of the second stanza, the cloud, which ceases in order to bring the background the fore, operates as the ‘pharmeikṓn’ within the poem. And it is ‘within’, not above or below, that the leaf, a flickering signifier, ‘floats’ — in between the moment of the speaker’s arrival on the river and his departure on which he demands the ‘blue flower of the evening,’ to love him. What is the image presented?  It is one of ‘deferral’ and ‘difference,’ of music and painting as the imagist poem shows a ‘complex in time’  — that evokes not only an intellectual but simultaneously an  ‘emotional’ response, instigating pathos within us towards the ‘eikṓn’ — the ecological image, which like a cloud is conjured by the ‘play’ of linguistic instances.

~ Vedika Rampal 

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Cited Texts:

Abrams, M.H. and Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Imagism” A Glossary of Literary Terms.  Cengage learning, Stamford:(2015), 173-174.

Aldington, Richard. “The River.” In Des Imagistes: An Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1914.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50782/50782-h/50782-h.htm

Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text. Hill and Wang, New York, 1977.

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism. 429–450. http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/derrida_platos_pharmacy.pdf

Emmelhainz, Irmgard. “Images Do Not Show: The Desire to See in the Anthropocene.” In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 131-141. Open Humanities Press, 2015.  http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/

Flint, F.S “Imagisme.” In Poetry, 1913: 199.

Hay, Andrew. "On the Shore of Interpretation: The Theory and Reading of the Image in Imagism*." Connotations : A Journal for Critical Debate 21, no. 2 (11, 2012): 304-326.

Hegel, G.W.F. "Poetry: Introduction.” In Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T.M. Knox, 959-999. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.https://monoskop.org/images/0/05/Hegel_GWF_Aesthetics_Lectures_on_Fine_Art_Vol_1_1975.pdf

Kant, Immanuel. “Analytic of the Sublime.” In Critique of Judgement, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, 97-208. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987. https://monoskop.org/images/7/77/Kant_Immanuel_Critique_of_Judgment_1987.pdf

Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. 3-14.

Pound, Ezra. “Vorticism.” The Fortnightly Review 1 Sept. 1914. 461-71.

Sherry, Vincent. “Imagism”. In The Cambridge History of English Poetry, 787–806. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Uexküll, Jacob von. “A Stroll Through The Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” In Semiotica 89-4 (1992): 319-391. http://www.codebiology.org/pdf/von%20Uexk%C3%83%C2%BCll%20J%20(1934)%20A%20stroll%20through%20the%20worlds%20of%20animals%20and%20men.pdf