In literature a symbol is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies some thing or has a range of reference, beyond it. Some symbols are “conventional” or “public”. Poets use conventional symbols; however also use “private” or “personal symbols”. Often they do so by exploiting widely shared associations between an object or event or action and a particular concept; for example the general association of the rising sun with birth and the setting sun with death.

Some poets, however, repeatedly use symbols whose significance largely generates themselves, and it poses a more difficult problem in interpretation.
Take as an example William Blake’s poem; “The Sick Rose”:

O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

This rose is not the vehicle for a simile or metaphor, because it lacks the paired subject- “my love” or the girl referred to as “she”- which is an identifying feature of these figures. It is not also an allegorical rose.
Blake’s rose is a rose-yet it is patently also something more than a rose: words such as “bed”, “joy”, “love”, which do not comport literary with an actual flower, together with the sinister tone and the intensity of the lyric speaker’s feeling, press the reader to infer that the described object has a further range of suggested but unspecified reference which makes it a symbol. But Blake’s rose is a personal symbol and not- like the symbolic rose in the closing cantos of Dante’s fourteen-century Paradiso and other Christian poems-an element in a set of conventional and widely known religious symbols. Only from the implicit suggestions in the poem itself _the sexual connotations of “bed” and “love”, especially in conjunction with joy and worm_ supplemented by our knowledge both of similar elements and topics in Blake’s other poems and of widespread associations in his culture with the objects described in the poem, are we led to infer that Blake’s lament for a crimson rose which has been entered and sickened unto death by a dark and secret worm symbolizes the destruction wrought by furtiveness, deceit, and hypocrisy in what should be a frank and joyous relationship of physical love.

Various poets of Romantic Period, including Novalis and Holderlin in Germany, Shelley and Blake in England and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emerson and Thoreau in America often used private symbols in their works.
In the late nineteenth century and as a reaction against naturalism and scientific materialism which had embarked upon total obliteration of man’s dignity and respect, the symbolic Movement began. There is no doubt that the symbolism was a counterpart of romanticism. Almost the same causes that helped the rise of romanticism provided an impetus to the growth of Symbolism. By the end of the nineteenth century the scientific materialism, which had grown much stronger since its first encounter with man and the effect of evolution by Darwin, had come to destroy man’s faith in himself and to force him to succumb to the domination of science and industrialism.
The French writer Charles Baudelaire (Fleurs du mal, 1857) based on the symbolic mode of his poems in part on the example of the American Edgar Allan Poe and the ancient belief in correspondences- the doctrine that there exist inherent and systematic analogies between the human mind and the outer world and also between the natural and the spiritual worlds- pioneered symbolism. Baudelaire puts this doctrine: “Everything, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual and natural world, is significative, reciprocal, converse, correspondent.” The techniques of the French Symbolists who exploited an order of private symbols in a poetry of rich suggestiveness rather than explicit signification, had an immense influence throughout Europe, and in England and America on poets such as Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson as well as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens.
The modern Period, in the decades after World War I, was a notable era of symbolism in literature. Many of the major writers of the period exploit symbols which are in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in part from their own invention. Some of the works of the age are symbolist in their settings, their agents, and their actions, as well as in the objects they refer to. Instances of a persistently symbolic procedure occur in lyrics, such as in Yeats’ “Byzantium” poems, Dylan Thomas’ series of sonnets Altarwise by Owl-light; in longer poems such as Hart Crane’s The Bridge, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; and in novels, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.


References:
Abrams, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, Sixth edition, Harcourt Brace College Publication, 1993.
Haghighi, Manoochehr, Literary Schools for University Students, Avaye Noor Publication, Tehran 1993.
Daiches, David, Critical Approaches to Literature, Second Edition, Longman, London and New York, 1987.



Maede Saadatmandian