A Little History of Signs and Symbols, by Lucy Newlyn

1

Chronos, the Greek god of Time, is master

of storytellers and poets, who use

two signs to figure the passage of time,

the circle and the arrow. Each sign

influences which movement they choose –

the circle going slow, the arrow faster.

Circular time is an eternal now

with repeating patterns, day into night

and round again. Arrow time speeds along

as narrative, or like a story-song

with signposts pointing to fight or flight,

ending in death – perhaps release somehow.

Time determines all genres and their forms.

Even lyric tells a basic story, moving

from A to Z, if not as narrative

then as the time a poet needs to give

to describing two people loving

or to hearing one minute of wild storm. 

Signs and symbols don’t always arrest time:

making one thing signify another

implies a gap, a pause, or a transition.

Signs glimpse the changing human condition

as an instance of a larger vision –

a snapshot in our evolution from slime.

Drawings and paintings can be erased

despite the hope they’ll freeze time forever

with no signs of deterioration.

They are clear, needing no explanation,

though commentary occurs, whatever,

changing according to person and place.

Two phases mark the pagan calendar:

the Summer and Winter solstice. Nature

is of course perennial, tracked by seasons,

no one questioning rhythms or reasons.

The Christian calendar has Easter,

Advent, Christmas, and further addenda.

From the start, thinking has always relied

on contrasts: man/woman, early and late

heaven/hell, black/white, angel/devil, tiger/

lamb, light and dark, sun and moon, figure

and ground, fox and hedgehog, love and hate,

sight/sound, given/taken, asked and replied.

Our choosing continues: shadow/substance,

fox/hedgehog, owl/lark, king/queen, concave

and convex: everywhere, contrasts abound.

The world is a draughtboard, choices confound

as we move from square to square. Wave on wave,

words are paired in every single instance.   

‘Without contraries is no progression’ –

those were Blake’s words, a century before

Marx outlined dialectical theory.

But Eternal Life pulses in the Tree,

both literally and as metaphor,

to allay fears and answer all questions.

Spreading its roots deep into the ground

and its branches high up into the sky,

the Tree of Life defies man’s destruction,

pronouncing its sentence on extinction

with words of hope and faith – ‘Death, thou shalt die’ –

spoken by pagan or Christian, lost or found.  

Back in the day, Stone Age humans in caves

painted symbolic animals on their walls,

in this way struggling to keep death at bay.

These were crude signifiers in which lay

wild cries, warnings of danger, urgent calls

like messages sent in bottles tossed by waves.

But there were also magical spells

and incantations, preserving life.

Voice was highly significant from the first,

satisfying humans’ eternal thirst

for love (child for parents, husband for wife)

with sacred waters drawn from echoing wells.

Ever since farming began, humans have known

when to work and when to rest, by the light –

sunrise and sunset determining actions.

The stars were there to guide their reactions,

with Aurora Borealis at night

when (for the few) it splendidly shone.

In Plato’s cave, shape-shadows dance on walls

in two dimensions. Humans dwell within,

interpreting them as projections from outside.

That they are heavenly is implied

by seeing the to-be and the has-been

in perpetual flux, like a waterfall.

For centuries, oral communication

seems likely to have had the upper hand.

Bards stood up to sing before listening folk,

but a time came when writing awoke

in every home throughout each land,

establishing a different expectation.

The mnemonic power of the oral

came into being first, enabling bards

to narrate epic poems which could be

remembered by an audience easily.

When written down, it was only from shards

that folk could piece together and recall.

Song has been the best ally of story

since it began – memories being recalled

with ease, and not only by household bards.

Stories were always best put into words

by those with experience of the world,

especially if beards were hoary.

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death

wiped out whole populations. Signs on doors

signified the presence of sickness inside.

Those doomed to death or dying couldn’t hide.

Dead bodies loaded on carts were seen no more:

masks were worn too seldom to protect breath.

The first printing-press was Gutenberg’s

in Fourteen Thirty-Six. Knowledge is power,

and power brought enlightenment to folk

who had been ignorant. They no longer spoke

hesitantly about the world’s doings. That hour

had passed; the old regime had reached its verge.

Once the written word had a valued place,

reading eyes turned inward, away from soul,

the personal edging out the communal.

Although this experience was gradual,

‘I’ came to reflect a fragmenting whole,

with recognition of each human face.

Through the ages, what signs signify

has been open to interpretation

and systems of meaning have often changed.

But although signs have busily ranged,

symbols have needed less explanation,

drawn from a communal pool which cannot lie.

Signs are the stuff of ordinary life

whereas symbols are rounded, giving a sense

of history lived by humans in all ages.

They accrete associations by stages,

emerging slowly, significance dense,

like bells ringing changes, with meanings rife.

The anthropology of symbols reveals

that gifts play their welcome part at thresholds.

Whether visitors are known or unknown guests,

they are offerings of respect to hosts

who accept them on behalf of households.

Politeness is needed, kindness compels.

Universal language? There’s no such thing.

Words originate from different stems.

Even associated languages grow

from different sound-seeds which nations sow.

The signs, their meanings, and their systems

ensure a rich harvest in what is said or sung.

Body language claims to be universal

and laughter mostly indicates joy,

whereas crying is a sign of sorrow.

But joy can be a disguise we borrow.

Do you want your child to be girl, or boy?

You take what you get, there’s no reversal.

Every greeting has its own meaning,

at least in the west. A handshake when

strangers first meet. And for a longer time,

a peck on both cheeks as affectionate mime.

A hug for friends and all within our kin.

A kiss on the lips for lovers meeting.

There are numerous natural enough signs

which communicate through long connection

with rural life and labour. The rainbow

and dove were symbols of peace God allowed

after the Flood. His forgiving reaction

was an Old Testament covenant with man.

No explanation is needed for rake and hoe,

fork and spade: they speak to everyone

the world over. Harvest time has acquired

a resonance which is symbolic, though mired

in mud, rock, earth, grit, clay, pebble, stone.

Work is central: nothing stops it being so.

Other symbols with inclusive meanings

are the heart, used to signify love,

the road, used by many to mean life’s journey,

the clef, and various signs for money.

(Children sometimes mix two of the above,

clefs and pounds the same, or similar seeming.)

In harbour life, there are eloquent signs

of warning: a foghorn nearby at sea

and a lighthouse, its long beam of turning light

going round as it shines in the night

while harbour-lights gleam around the quay,

waves lapping among boats all the time.

In sacred life, bells mark time in church

or at the start and finish of school days.

But they are also invitations, ringing

at weddings or christenings, a choir singing.

At funerals, a bell tolls its solemn praise –

call it celebration, prayer, or dirge.

Candles are always doubly significant –

lighted on birthday cakes to celebrate,

but in churches to accompany prayers

beneath altars or at funeral pyres.

Pulpits can serve as lecterns. While we wait

for sermons or lectures, we know what’s meant.

In one context the ‘V’ sign is an insult,

in another it signals victory. We know

which it is by faces that are alight

with joy, frowning in anger, or showing fright.

People who communicate are seldom thrown,

unless they are outsiders to a cult.

Skull and crossbones are recurring symbols –

not limited to pirates, but prevalent

in graveyards and as warnings about death.

The oncoming scythe signals failing health,

gripped by the reaper or his dark equivalent,

reducing humans to bodies which tremble.

Mime has always been the most accessible

of the arts: humankind can interpret

body language with ease. Actions on stage

in plays less so – and yet through every age

the theatre has been a valued art,

with feelings both visible and audible.

With the invention of the wheel, there came

its connection with ideas of permanence –

and with suffering, as in the wheel of fire.

And one symbol for the eternal never tires:

the snake eating its tail has prominence

because, giving hope, it seems to arrest time.

II

Before the pendulum clock was invented,

time was a long haul on the road to Heaven

and symbols such as the journey prevailed.

Folk would end up in Hell if they failed

and went off in side-lanes or tracks, even

losing their way in roads left un-mended.

Langland showed Piers the Plowman in dream

walking a land that is allegorised,

though these are plainly Counties in England.

The Plowman speaks to those who stray around,

advising them with wisdom extemporised,

and supplies meaning which matches his theme.

Chaucer sent his pilgrims on a journey,

seeking their souls’ renewal in the spring.

Each pilgrim represents an occupation:

They all enter a friendly competition

Knight, Friar, Miller, Reeve – all sharing

their stories for love and not for money.

When Bunyan published Pilgrim’s Progress

he too used the classic symbol of journey

to create an allegory of life.

Pilgrim is everyone who feels joy and grief –

assailed by signs and yet finding his way

Despite bad signs to heaven (more or less).

Bunyan himself served a sentence in jail –

a victim of censorship, whose life followed

the pattern of his fiction. He became

a hero for his beliefs and his name

was synonymous with what faith allowed

in a nation where true endeavour fails.

We learn that Shakespeare, every time he wrote,

concealed himself – a shapeshifter whose role

as writer-director meant that he could wear

a mask. His identity was one to share.

Rightly or wrongly, some allege he stole

material which had the players’ vote

A non-possessive ethos becomes clear

in the various spellings of his name,

which change with each context and occasion,

to be met by scholars with evasion.

Names look different but sound the same –

Shakspere, Shakespear, Shakespere, and now Shakespeare.

In his plays, men dress up as women,

ensuring their lovers don’t spot the disguise.

But the audience is of course in the know,

waiting for masks to slip – though when and how

this happens is withheld, even from eyes

used to what the sexes have in common.

Galileo was a polymath, the first

to observe gravity at work – giving rise

to the apocryphal tale of a falling

apple. At that stage, few were willing

to progress further than their own surmise

and admit his ideas, lacking trust.  

The seventeenth century saw the first

telescope invented, which brought expansion

to the world and what was seen by explorers.

But that an instrument might see for us

did not please everyone. A large mansion

seen by all is, for some, a turn for the worse.

Donne was a master of paradox

who lived parallel lives to the end,

a holy man with a secular heart

in life and love, as well as in his art.

Devoutness in his sermon-style could blend

with his love for both romance and sex.

This doubleness is reflected in a book

which joins holy sonnets with love songs.

It is also there in a punning game

he played jestingly with his fluid name:

‘John Donne, Anne Donne, undone.’ It lasted long,

despite all his joshing, and the risks he took.

He wrote about passion using fierce words

and knotted syntax, appealing to God

or seducing potential lovers with signs.

He saw a flea carrying food like wine

as a symbol for the exchange of blood,

enabling sex as a mingling of goods.

He had a map of the expanding world

to inspire him, and metaphors of maps

abound in his poems. He shrank the distance

between lovers. He also used the instance

of a compass to show that he would perhaps

come back home, once adventure had unfurled.   

Herbert led a quiet, reclusive life

writing poems as sermons. His Temple

was a book in which a poem shaped like

an altar saw offerings for the sake  

of Christ, whose death was the supreme example

of divine sacrifice, the cross as knife.

The MS of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ shows a mind

in process, deliberating each word.

This prophet’s scrupulous revisions told

of revisions –always clever, sometimes bold.

(Lamb was shaken, as one who had revered

spontaneity, to see lines interlined.)

Paradise Lost was an epic which traced

The Fall of Satan, with Man redeemed

through the resurrection and compassion

of Christ. Blank verse was granted a ration

of divine love, through which fallen man seemed

able through epic to regain God’s grace.

Milton’s troubled puns opened a space

for doubles – fallen meanings foreseen

by Adam and Eve in the unfallen state

before Satan as serpent made them taste

that apple from the Tree of Life, or weaned

them off their innocence in Paradise.

Rochester revelled in dark sacrilege,

mocking Christianity’s words and deeds.

Feeding his poetry with flaming ire,

he showed that when it comes up to the wire

sex is sex, men are beasts planting their seeds,

he himself the godless spirit of his age.  

Chatterton’s forgeries are evidence

of his yearning to be in a place and time

far from his own. Rowley the monk

was a fiction in whom was sunk

a strong desire for antiquated rhyme,

but forgery went beyond good sense.

The price this poet paid was suicide,

like Socrates a victim to his faith.

But his forgeries have inspired much verse –

sometimes (as with Coleridge) witnessing worse,

for STC was wedded to Sara beneath

St Mary Redcliffe’s cross, and his marriage died.  

Sterne in Tristram Shandy would use a blank

to signify space for readers – and coils

to illustrate the fall of a walking-stick.

Reviewers built meaning brick by brick,

captivated by the hero’s ploys and toils,

with a witty novelist’s wiles to thank.

Clock time played an important part in Sterne’s

novel, with the weekly ritual of winding

a grandfather clock to mark the potential

for conception. Shandy is deferential

toward the clock as symbol – his mind finding

its own origin, piqued and amused by turns.

Richardson’s use of letters enabled

a division of time into clear sections

with people revealing their character

in tone, style, and choice of register.

Motives and thoughts determined slow actions:

speech was implied, but not available.

As a lifelong Puritan through and through,

he put both Clarissa and his readers

to the test – allowing Lovelace to rape,

his friends holding her down while they gaped.

Clarissa underwent pain, needed as

sacrifice to earn her the heaven she knew.

David Hartley saw the mind as Locke did:

a tabula rasa being printed

with impressions received from the outside.

To this he added vibrations, which died

slowly as they faded. Newly minted,

they were bright with vibrant life, and vivid.

In novels of sensibility, love

ensured that a sound society was built,

each person’s heartbeat newly evincing

sympathy in its urgent re-printing.

Rich travellers relieved persistent guilt

by giving coins for tears, from high above.

The Gothic Novel was a new genre

in which signs and symbology were rife.

Heroines passed through a maze of symbols,

learning to discern, if they were able,

the difference between false and true in life.

Their reward? Marriage, a kind of Nirvana.

Franklin advanced knowledge of electricity.

This inspired many to write, using

it either literally or as metaphor.

It represented a threshold or door

for Mary Shelley, who started fusing

it with ideas of human energy.

She created a new myth of creation,

With Frankenstein playing God, whose creature

was both Adam and Satan, on the rampage

amongst humans. Children and those in old age

were victims. Frankenstein begged his teacher

to create a female, risking damnation.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century

great faith was placed in the new millennium,

especially by radicals at a time

when protest was considered a crime.

Habeas Corpus meant nothing in prison,

and lasting peace was a mere memory.

Priestley saw that ‘dephlogisticated

air’ was oxygen. A Unitarian,

he believed that God is the air we breathe

and that His energy bubbles beneath

the visible world. This sectarian

belief was vilified and rejected.

Paine was a deist, who read God’s book

not as institutionalised religion

but as Nature sending signs to humankind.

The observer’s task was to seek and find

noumenal meaning in its transmissions,

interpreting each silent glance or look.

Blake, too, had no truck with formal religion.

His books were filled with engravings in fine

tinted colours. Angel-devils conversed

with him at dead of night. Daily he reversed

the church’s values in rhythms and rhymes

which combined magic with eccentric vision.

The marks Blake noticed on passing strangers

walking through London were projected

by himself (and by context) on their minds.

The metaphor of stark etching binds

victims, making them strongly connected –

much like chained dogs in stables or mangers.

At the turn of the eighteenth century

painters and sketchers used watercolour

or pencil to capture landscapes, the weather,

scenes with mountains, rocks, and heather,

farmers or shepherds in scenes of dolour.

Lake District scenes had arrived at their heyday.

Wordsworth made pain his routine excuse

not to put quill to paper. The household

did loving work for him, which was unpaid.

His verse was a garden in which he played,

fostering plants and herbs till he was old –

his mulch being spread abroad for common use.

For mystics throughout history, time stood still

during moments of heightened perception.

Wordsworth called these ‘spots of time’. They were

connected for him with the joy and fear

felt in boyhood, in whose conception

lay a promise his adult mind would fulfil.

Walking through the Simplon Pass, he saw

the types and symbols of eternity

in surrounding rocks. Writing about God,

he passed for a Unitarian. The Lord

was present as something about to be –

the foundation of natural religion, not law.

He was notorious for revisions,

often spoiling his early drafts to reflect

changes in his thoughts as he was ageing.

Self was performed. The mind needed staging –

each word treated as one he might reject,

enabling hesitations and misprisions.   

Coleridge confided in his Notebooks,

a lonely voice always needing to be heard

by Dorothy, who adored her brother.

His notes described for self and other

what lay around him. Scribbled words

gave a voice to fountains, rivers, brooks.

He re-wrote Genesis as his own myth,

Kubla Khan echoing God by creating

an Edenic garden with a fountain

instead of a tree. In its rapid mounting,

falling, splashing, water’s satiating

embodied imagination’s heady froth.  

The Grasmere Journal contained fresh thoughts,

transcriptions, jottings, perceptions, visions.

Dorothy kept some secrets so profound

she hid them in prose no eye could sound.

But instruments pierced words with precision,

interpreting the web in which she was caught.

Her journals recorded her memories

and those of her brother, for common use

by the household, their circle, and his poems.

When he wrote, they were frequently combed

for source material he himself could choose,

and for compiling personal histories.

This trinity of writers had one voice

which read aloud from the Book of Nature,

three minds which interpreted local signs

as a fluid system of organic lines.

Later, Nature was an Anglican preacher

who moved into the Church, their final choice.

Keats lived a life of allegory,

experience being a fortunate fall

and suffering the price paid for evil.

He saw no need for angels or devils.

A semi-atheist, he obeyed calls

for help, using his own mythology.

His Odes were prayers of thanksgiving

to Nature, and all kinds of beauty, whether

moving or still. In one to a Grecian Urn

he praises a town on a hill, with a turn

away to a still picture. Which would we rather –

stillness, or the warm breath of the living?

Having a surgeon’s interest in hands,

he saw poems as instruments of healing.

It followed that poetry must be clear

and clean, probing deceased bodies with care.

Surgeons make their incisions gently, feeling

for the pulsing heart pierced by open wounds.

Talking of hearts, drowned Shelley’s wouldn’t burn

but was preserved (or so the story goes).

His entire life was shaped by the symbol of fire.

It signified the passion and the ire

from which an urgent revolution grows.

Rebels must suffer for the fame they earn.

An atheist, he read Nature’s book

as a landscape, with imagination

revealed in chasms beneath Mont Blanc.

The MS of his poem suggests avalanche

in mountain and mind. In this fashion,

Nature as allegory was where to look.

Byron wrote at high speed, here and there a blot,

composing corrosive satire by the yard,

never distracted while he was thus employed.

His mind danced wildly as he filled a void,

tumescent as he gathered every shard,

fluent as he fired each angry, deadly shot.

He was an athlete and soldier who fought

in the Greek War of independence against

the Ottoman empire, a great hero

among Greeks. Earlier, while at Harrow,

he loved both women and men, risking a taint,

but enjoyed the hero-worship this brought.

De Quincey saw history and the mind

as a palimpsest, within which layers

of arcane matter waited to be found,

like Pompeii discovered underground –

the past sending hopes and urgent prayers

to archaeologists in their daily grind.

Suffering was buried inside persons,

the price of experience writ large

in personifications of sorrow,

a debt fully paid for what man borrowed

before he fell. This guilt was not assuaged

by atonement, or imbibing poison.

III

The Victorians looked back on the past

with nostalgia, some of them yearning

for the French Revolution, like Carlyle.

Others saw England as a stranded isle

which industry darkened or left burning,

intense flames threatening destruction fast.

Matthew Arnold epitomised the zeitgeist.

Lost between two worlds, he longed to be back

with Sophocles, before the Sea of Faith

had withdrawn – or perhaps with Wordsworth

by the Derwent or the Rotha, no lack

of the spiritual in which to trust.

Hopkins the Jesuit priest was unique.

He defied time by understanding

inscape and instress as intersections

between God’s eternal acts of reflection

and grateful human prayer ascending

in poems brindled with blotches and streaks.

Seeing human nature in Catholic terms

as innately tainted, he drew on words

that were guttural, like a caveman’s cry

in Welsh, voicing itself before it dies.

Rich with coinages, his lines flew like birds

with soaring energy in compressed forms.

For him, ‘inscape’ was a timeless vision

which inhered in the whole natural world,

suffusing it with sudden radiance

and inducing a state much like a trance.

He was ravished by divine beauties revealed,

which formed a profound, enduring impression.

Dickens had a Shakespearian vision

with clear choices between good and evil.

London was a maze where humans were lost,

winning their way to heaven at a cost

by learning to strip disguised devils

and replace all warped, malign misprision.

Signifying self, his autograph is clear,

its flamboyant flourishes controlled with skill.

His signature stands proud atop the folds

of loops like millefeuille, its black inking bold –

yet, as in Bleak House, obscure with fog’s thrill

of mystery, which fills the mind with fear.

Inspector Bucket is a detective

who knows the streets of London like the back

of his hands. He follows felons around:

no one escapes, not even Lords of the land.

From rich to poor, he has them all tracked,

seeing Tom All Alone from Jo’s perspective.

Emily Bronte lived beside the moor –

lonely when in her home, but free outside.

Like her heroine Catherine she wandered

Fearlessly, and with her sisters pondered

the meaning of love, life, and being wild –

scratching at windows, opening each door.

In Middlemarch George Eliot provides

a detailed, realistic account of life

in a small English town, where careers

are shaped by gossip, neighbours all ears.

A doctor is ruined by a spendthrift wife.

Once ethical, he comes to slither and slide.

Dorothea endures her long night of the soul,

after which she opens curtains to see

plainly before her an ordinary scene

of human beings as they have always been:

a man and woman carrying a baby

on a road. Nowadays, they’d be on the dole.   

Eliot’s narrator was omniscient.

Concerned with ethics, she was forever

tracing the growth of moral consciousness,

empathy, sympathy. Ethical fitness

earned individuals their rights, severed

the moment they rebelled against constraints.

Oscar Wilde used the universal sign

of disguise, the mask, on which he projected

the portrait. Dorian Gray in the end

faced self-destruction – the fate God sends

to all those evil men who have rejected

a moral path, to choose one that’s malign.

Emily Dickinson hid her manuscripts away

to be discovered after she had died.

Her handwriting is easy to read,

a script on which scholar-poets can feed,

ensuring that secrecy spreads far and wide

with fascicles she left in disarray.

She developed her own punctuation,

the dash forming her own unique system.

This served to highlight pauses in her thought,

struggles with her faith, or the peace she sought.

Her privacy came from her deep wisdom,

enabling secret communication.

Henry James saw Americans as innocent

and Europeans as venal and sly.

But The Turn of the Screw, set in England,

has a governess who’s hard to understand,

with two demonic children standing by

seeming to be angelic, heaven-sent.

The villain is a gardener, Peter Quint,

who works with the former governess

to wreak havoc on everyone there.

Signs are misleading. The evil Quint stares

from a tower, Jessel stands motionless

by a lake. Both kids die, their eyes like flint.

Ambiguity is the key to James,

whose subtle, sinuous style leads us astray.

We are left completely bewitched and bemused

by the screw turning on us, and confused

as to whether the kids are at their play.

Jessel and Quint play far from pretty games. 

Marx saw history as a long march toward

revolution, when the working class

would bring an end to capitalism,

replacing it with sound communism –

but it might take a long time till the race

undergoes the changes it must afford.

Meanwhile, Darwin had changed how time was seen

by making a case for evolution.

In the Bible, it took just seven days

to bring about the primary phase:

God’s completion of the whole Creation.

Two theories thus emerged of what time means.

A parallel could be drawn with geology.

Lyell was thinking about seismic change

in the earth’s strata, formations in rock

inviting comparison with the shock

evolution gave at first. This seemed strange

until we absorbed the analogies.

Browning was well-read in literature

of all ages and often used allusion.

His Dramatic Monologues were spoken

sotto voce by villainous men, broken

by their own murderous confusion,

who do without God’s love altogether.

In Childe Roland, Browning found a hero

who traversed a land trodden down by those

before him, who’d failed to find the Holy Grail

because distracted or losing the right trail.

They doubled up as his own precursors,

poets who were over-zealous weirdos.

Tennyson had mad genes in the family

and created heroines who enacted his fears,

Mariana being typical. Shut inside

her moated grange, the clock ticking, she hides

from all but the lover she hopes will appear

to save her from the present, past, and memory.

In Maud, the hero – clearly a surrogate

for the poet – is mad, wishing to be

buried deep in the earth, where sounds of war

won’t assail him. He is gone so far

into madness that, even in love, he

is unable to feel.  Love comes way too late.

Hardy wrote novels before turning poet,

though with some overlapping of the two.

A semi-atheist, he watched how God

disappeared, and found Christian faith odd

given the number of evils in the queue –

enough to cause uprisings, even riot.

He went back to the classics, seeing fate

as the cause of lasting poverty and death.

His novels were like Greek tragedies –

in Henchard’s case, lack of sobriety

being the proximate cause of his last breath.

His hero signs a tragic Will, giving no date.

For the Victorians, time’s figurations

had overlapped, artists understanding

these as partly synchronised.

In The Time Machine, Wells analysed

Darwinian and Freudian strandings

the traveller moving through all striations.

IV

Exploration and new discoveries

have transformed how symbols are understood.

Transformations occur because the world

is seen afresh when knowledge is revealed.

Technology has been mostly for the good,

enabling a clearer mapping of land, sky, seas.

In the nineteenth century, changes made

in expanding the reach of messages

with the telegraph made it more possible

to communicate often. Traceable

though they were, one could send short passages

which arrived quickly and would never fade.

The telephone, invented soon after,

took inventiveness further, and helped

everyone to communicate better

than by writing a snail mail letter.

Although calls were possible to intercept,

the phone proved successful thereafter.

Systems for organising human time

could be seen as a thin superstructure

beneath which we find ways to understand

external things as processed by the mind.

With psychiatry had come a fixture

securing thought, as if with mortar and lime.  

Complications occurred when time measured

by the clock was sidelined by the brain’s

imagining its own internal world

as a place where minutes and hours unfurled,

during which thoughts moved in a slow train –

each dream, image, metaphor, being treasured.

Freud penetrated deep into the mind,

seeing each case as personal, unique,

albeit with often-recurring tropes.

He kindly helped many patients to cope

with conditions that made them slow to speak

of what they suffered, caught in a double bind.

With psychoanalysis as a key,

the analyst could unlock patients’ dreams.

Together they read these as transcripts

of unconscious desires, which might be tripped

by attention to significance in reams:

the patient underwent change, for a fee.  

Jung drank from a stream which never stops,

finding archetypes in man’s communal past.

His version of the unconscious has no freaks.

He knew the damage that convention wreaks

and developed with patients a lasting trust,

seeing them as trees from which fruit drops.

Both daily life and dreams gave materials

for interpreting a worldwide system

of symbols and signs. Humans once again

hid in caves, which were wombs holding a sane

potential for meaning. Signs were symptoms

of sickness, earthly or ethereal.

 Both Jung and Freud were doctors who observed

 their patients with patience as they progressed

 from illness to health, speaking dreams out loud.

 They stared deep and hard beneath the black shroud

 concealing truths that language in dreams expressed.

 Looking back, we know what purpose they served.

 Lawrence in Sons and Lovers was strangely obtuse

 about the implications of Freud’s insights.

 Instead of embracing the Oedipus complex,

 he chose to disguise his approach to sex,

 clearly worrying to the point of fright

 and deflecting knowledge onto the abstruse.

Baudelaire in Les Fleurs Du Mal approached

Nature as a temple of pillars which

emitted a language he thought confused,

amidst which humans wandered, mostly bemused.

These pillars were familiar and rich

in obscure meaning, with sounds which encroached.

Yeats feared a swan’s whiteness could be destroyed

by a spot of ink. Concessions are hard,

but Jon Stallworthy minded not one jot.

Some poets spoil their work, but Yeats did not.

Change in him showed the greatness of a bard

uplifted by the fervour he enjoyed.

Embedded deep in the Celtic Twilight,

he used symbolic language to evolve

a system of his own – but depending

on occult traditions, and extending

signs into archetypes – deeply involved

with his bardic or visionary sight.

Joyce was steeped in Aquinas, and for him

timeless visions were epiphanies – intense,

lifting objects that were ordinary

to a realm of the extraordinary

unreached by normal sound or sense,

compared to which all else was cloudy, dim.

Stephen Dedalus wanders through the streets

of Dublin, searching for his lost father,

while Bloom passes a day in the city

grieving for his dead son, arousing pity.

Joyce re-writes heroic epic. Whether

we follow depends on a Guide with notes.

Virginia Woolf found Joyce’s language lewd

and distasteful. Her own world was refined

and this was reflected in her novels.

Like him, she saw crowds of people jostle

with others of a lower class or kind

but she traced interchanges far from crude.

Mrs Dalloway charts the events of a day

inside the mind of one woman. Clock time

determines actions, stream of consciousness

articulating thoughts as they rise and cease.

Big Ben rings out the hours like rhythmic rhyme

as wealthy people go their way.

In The Waves, six friends talk to themselves,

revealing their inner thoughts and feelings,

brought together now and again for meals.

Consciousness blurs the bounds of what is real

and genuine communication steals

up, arriving only when the mind delves.

For Woolf, epiphanies were ‘moments

of being’, filled with symbolic potential.

They took place as insights on a small scale

far from the trenches of war, and only failed

in the sense that they weren’t referential,

ambiguity clouding what they meant.  

Edward Thomas wrote country travel prose

for a decade before he met Frost, tried

his hand at poetry, and succeeded

in undergoing the big change needed.

But War swooped – and like so many he died,

scythed down in his prime for the fate he chose.

Farmer Frost blamed himself for this error,

imagining he had more influence

than his friend felt. Thomas knew that all roads

led to France. His fated decision showed

not just his valour, but the sad, intense

state of his marriage, which was a failure.

Still, he had helped Frost with being read

by reviewing him well, and his own work

had been as good as the verse in North of Boston.

Doubtless he was glad of its reception

and felt no envy, though Frost went on to shirk

a favour he could have paid to the dead.

Both these poets loved rural life. The road

was for them a continuous symbol

of their companionable walking,

both literal and as metaphor, talking

all the while. Thomas was not triumphal,

like the few who returned as the un-dead.

The remaining War Poets took the trench,

not the road, as their leading metaphor

in fine, fierce poems of protest against

atrocities at the Front. War’s grim taint

could not be cleaned from any floor

while Europe was awash with its vile stench.

These men fought side by side with young soldiers

who died before they reached twenty-one –

war an assault on compassion and reason.

Owen died just as conflict was done

after meeting poor shell-shocked Sassoon,

who lived to tell his tale to survivors.

The long shadow of war hung over

the world for decades to come, its echoes

resounding through countless generations.

On land, nations go on fighting nations

while in verse the strife that Leaders choose

has been condemned, but few will recover.

Eliot saw London as a city laid waste

by war, a place seeking regeneration.

Madame Sosostris with her pack of cards

awoke the poets who, like ancient bards,

stood for values once held dear by the nation,

teaching its people to revere good taste.

Collaboration was the name of the game

for this poet turning to Pound for aid.

His dedication to The Waste Land

gave thanks for a gift that passed hand to hand –

a unique masterpiece these two had made,

both staying themselves while becoming the same.

The Fisher King would make the land fertile,

helped by incantations signifying rain.

When the poet gained his Christian faith

he felt an expansion of human breath,

free to walk the countryside, sane again.

Signs were taken as wonders for a while.

However, Pound caused damage in his way

with the Imagist Manifesto,

articulating a love of potent signs

in this work that poets of all kinds still mine.

He gave expression order, and hey presto:

poetry changed, images were here to stay.

But Eliot came back in The Four Quartets

with music as a metaphor for time.

Seeking God in a sacralised landscape

which the war had left desolate and raped,

he found the sacred in rhythm and rhyme,

passing on faith to the many he met.

D.H. Lawrence, in Lady Chatterton’s Lover,

painted an enduring portrait of a man

disabled by war, unable to have sex

with his wife. Distraught, extremely vexed,

the couple are split apart. Nothing can

heal the wound. His wife leaves for another.

For decades, abstract painting was one way

of expressing concepts beyond the reach

of language. Surrealism, too, gave

abstraction a medium in which to live.

Picasso, Braques, Chagal, and others would teach

their subtle art, which for a while held sway. 

‘Guernica’ was the one painting

above all others which captured war

in its essential horror, an image

which became an iconic demiurge.

Destruction was here captured in the raw:

no looking away, no masks, no feinting.

During World War Two, the Nazi salute

and swastika were signals and badges

under which Hitler conducted genocide.

Seventeen million Jews were gassed and died

to purify the German nation. Images

of concentration camps lined the route.

After this ‘war to end all wars’, a terror

which could not utter its own name found voice

in its only possible symbol: silence.

Wittgenstein knew this, and sidelined violence –

turning to sight and symbol to express

ambiguity and human error.

Gestalt was dominated by his duck-rabbit.

This example proved we’re able to see

duck before rabbit, or the other way round,

but not both together: true. But with sound,

two meanings can be grasped at once. We agree

this about puns, when heard as a habit.

Escher made drawings which were ambiguous:

shapes which on the page interacted.

Sight could be mistaken, recognising

one shape as the other, then realising

the mistake and standing newly corrected.

The artistic dividends were wondrous.  

George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty–Four,

invented his own language, Newspeak,

which was written and received by all

who suffered dictatorship and the call

of Big Brother. He was able to peek

inside houses, so great was his power.

In Animal Farm, pigs are the rulers,

capable of swiftly changing the rules

to suit themselves as tyrants. They all grow

ever more tyrannical in doing so –

which is ensured by the number of fools

willingly subservient to new rules.

A new world emerged with Saussure’s notion

of a slippage between sign and signified.

This reflected the zeitgeist, fragmentation

being a fear made real in all nations

which had seen soldiers in their millions die,

truces having very little or no traction.

Nineteen Sixty-Three was a major year,

as Philip Larkin wrote. The Beatles saw

the release of their first LP, and the ban

was lifted on Lady Chatterley. Fans

learned how to scream. Censorship withdrew,

freedom to write what one thinks came near.

Progress is good but has its downside as well.

One example is the first moon landing,

which stripped the moon of symbolic value.

It lost the romance of being seldom viewed

except from afar, and thus its standing

for artists who saw it sadly spoiled.

Critical Theory transformed study

completely, and ‘a terrible beauty

was born’. Intellectuals were keener

than ever to uncover meanings. Greener

students remained content with astutely

mounting close readings, for love or duty.  

V          

If adulthood is the cave or lonely jail

in which we serve our sentence until death,

then signs and symbols are at once bars

imprisoning, and keyholes for glimpsing stars –

for language can be life and strength and breath

while prison reminds us only that we fail. 

What’s at work in handwriting, that it should

give secrets away like the fingerprints

of one accused in court of recent crime?

We cannot hide ourselves. Plainly our shame

reveals our lives and terrors. The slightest hint

of past misdeeds betrays how things have stood.

My Dad was like a gaoler, seeming the reverse.

Formerly a Major, critical of faults,

his character and handwriting matched.

He punished paper with pen as we watched,

his strong marching rhythm – think, start, halt –

indenting words that lasted, tough and terse.

It was much the same with teachers at school

who faced us all, upright at the blackboard,

introducing the most important signs.

The three ‘R’s trained reluctant or eager minds

in numerals and how to manage words,

reinforcing knowledge with rod and rule.

Marks on the page were rigid. We heeded

words learned by heart, with punctuation

and spelling second only to syntax. Wired

in the brain from birth, grammar never tires.

It structures thought and speech; Action

must be led by reflection when needed.

However distinctive a style may be

it’s hard to resist conformist pressure,

in language as much as clothing or cars.

Pete Seeger got it right. The prison bars

close tight round our little boxes. Freshers

in universities are far from free.

University narrows learning down

to specialisms students have chosen

until as scholars they gain their degrees.

(In my time we weren’t charged for this with fees

but were granted funding not yet frozen,

proud to harvest grain our schools had grown.)

Graduates become proudly erudite –

experts in signs matching their profession,

and of symbols in selected books.

Despite gaining these by hook or crook

they complain about education,

needing a stimulant that will excite.

When studying language, symbols are rife.

It’s here that students grapple with meaning

in rigorous enquiries about signs,

at first believing that, like full end-rhymes,

they fit together in ordered seaming –

until we note the slippages of life.

They look for continuities in style,

committed to the firm belief that self

remains a thread which readers can still trace

even when authors change their name and place.

But identity is like a coastal shelf

constantly shifting around an isle.

Students sit in lectures scanning mobiles

or tap-tap-tapping on their keyboards

instead of listening and taking notes.

Occasionally they will jot down quotes

since speech appeals less than the written word –

and they do show an interest in style.

Oral traditions should survive, at least

in universities, but fresh research

is more highly valued for its funding,

which replaces teaching and bonding.

Lectures and sermons belong in church

and tutorials are (sadly) a rare feast.

The rot set in with charging student fees –

education became a cynical trade,

parents demanding value for hard cash.

The whole enterprise is becoming brash,

with vocations and careers betrayed.

Vice Chancellors are onto a cunning wheeze.

At poetry readings, the oral survives

and if we read the words on the page

we can add listening to sight-reading verse.

But honestly, there isn’t much that’s worse

than hearing academics in old age

droning on at friends, students, wives.

There’s also a difference between those

who read at launches then sign their books

and footballers autographing fans’ shirts,

supplementing names with kisses and hearts.

Not to be outdone in words, deeds, looks,

the former stay safe in the circles they choose.

Tattoos have sometimes met similar needs,

designed to serve our families and clans –

uniting humans in a common cause

or a group’s habits, customs, laws.

We spot their defensive signals if we can,

finding on other skins new signs and creeds.

As a girl of eleven I had to join Brownies,

but I wore my badge less as an honour

than one of shame, and was swiftly chucked out

when I rebelled. I liked hymns, but felt doubt

when it came to schools. War under a banner

was bad, like that of the hostile townies.

The Labour Party was a kind of club

to which our family swore allegiance.

This lasted all my life, but I left

because of the war on Iraq, bereft.

I do not warm to Starmer, or his stance.

Gaza put paid to drinks with him in the pub.

As you see, I’ve been through many changes

since my teens, when my writing was so small

it seemed to disappear, as I myself did,

by slimming long and hard till my flesh hid.

After leaving Lady Margaret Hall

my script enlarged. Nowadays it ranges.

Universities have seen signs alter

over the four decades of my career,

more injunctions to ‘stay off the lawn’

being one instance. Colleges have grown

restive at Admissions: no longer sure

of good candidates, they flail and falter.

College life altered when email arrived.

Phones no longer rang in tutorials

and the speaking voice suddenly disappeared.

Stranded tutors were no longer cheered

by chats with friends and colleagues. Memorial

services honoured colleagues who had died.

Students are now used to typing. They write

with discomfort in exams, and struggle

to get thoughts down in stretches of three hours.

We need to support these scholars’ powers,

helping them avoid the stress and muddle

which wreck them with an ultra-modern blight.

And now that the mobile is here to stay,

people stand in silent queues at bus stops,

eyes fixed to miniscule screens as they scroll

for texts. They’re on a speedy, urgent roll,

moving messages up to their screen tops.

Absorbed in signs, they’ll wait here each day.

As for social media, it’s well-known

that there are dangers in anonymous posts

which allow bullies to get off scot-free.

Type – send –wait – revenge. That’s the way to be.

In sent messages, body language lost,

we’re waiting for help, fragile and alone.

The internet has left us all exposed

to scams, which set out to exploit AI.

Cheating scammers know our words and phrases,

our fond crushes and our passing crazes,

escaping the most penetrating eye

with never a telling clue disclosed.

COVID brought a further revolution

in the way communication takes place.

Forbidden to meet, we soon adapted.

Zoom enables life to be enacted

on camera, face encountering face.

Employers exploit this sad situation.

With work moving safely into the home,

meetings lost the intimacy which thrives

on bodily warmth and mutual trust.

We see colleagues on screen because we must,

in the two dimensions which live our lives,

cutting costs while we’re yearning to roam.

Long ago Barthes pronounced the author dead

and began a trend for deconstruction.

Writing took to floating, a track or trace

without an origin, a name, a face.

The world paid heed to widespread destruction,

discarding shibboleths the past had fed.

But scholars rigorous as detectives pore

over manuscripts till their eyes are tired,

straining to make out the shapes of words

which swim and swirl on every page like birds.

A palaeographer is soon enmired,

as some musicians are by others’ scores.

So the author-myth is far from ended.

Deceased authors keep coming up for air.

Their dues are kept intact by copyright

in safes and banks that booksellers seal tight.

Exploding such myths is by no means fair,

and authors ensure that they are defended.