Emblem Structure

The emblem structure is a two-part structure that turns from an organized description of an object to a meditation on, a consideration of, the meaning of that object.  I discuss the emblem structure more fully in Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns.  Below are supplemental poems and discussion.

“The Rhodora,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Willow in Spring Wind: A Showing,” by Jorie Graham

“The Tree,” by James Reaney (in The Tree (Toronto: Coach House, 1969).

“In Tennessee I Found a Firefly,” by Mary Szybist

“The Waiting,” by Mary Szybist (in Granted (Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2003): 45-6).

To see some early emblem poems which involve visual representations, check out:

The English Emblem Book Project, from Penn State

Book of Emblems, by Andrea Alciato

For more emblem poems (though no visual representations), you might also read some more poems by Coleridge.  According to Richard Holmes, the editor of Coleridge’s Selected Poems from Penguin Classics, “Some of [Coleridge's] most powerful and disturbing fragments are ‘emblem’ poems, where there is a strong sense of menacing or forbidding meanings.  Here again the small or tell-tale image mysteriously implies some much larger concept.”  Holmes includes in his list of Coleridge’s emblematic fragments “A Sunset,” “A Dark Sky,” “The Tropic Tree,” “Psyche,” and “The World That Spidery Witch.

“Winter Trees,” by Sylvia Plath

“The Fly,” by William Blake

Plath’s and Blake’s poems are intentionally unsuccessful emblem poems.  Plath’s poem does not progress toward knowledge and the ease such knowing can provide, and it, in fact, states, finally, that it cannot progress in such a way.  The reflection at the end of Blake’s poem is intentionally about as careless as the action which gives rise to it.

Knowing about poetic structures, the patterns of turns in poems, does not only help one better understand (and perhaps appreciate) poems that clearly are written within a particular structural tradition, but it also helps one to engage more deeply poems that reference particular structural traditions.  Such is the case with the following poems, which refer significantly to the emblem structure without employing the emblem’s turn from observation to reflection.

“Coyote, with Mange,” by Mark Wunderlich

(For commentary on how knowing about the emblem structure informs a reading of Wunderlich’s poem, click here, and check out the post “Emblem, with Mange.”)

“Reconstruction: An Emblem,” by Christina Pugh (in Restoration: Poems (Evanston, Illinois: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2008): 15).

“Sea Urchin,” by J. Allyn Rosser