theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth 207
The common ground between a beautiful woman, a fresh red
rose, and a well-played melody is their beauty and desirability}
they are all, in kind, the best. It isn't rosy cheeks which makes
the woman like a rose, or her sweet voice which makes her like
a melody (analogies which would produce Decorative images)}
her likeness to a rose is not in color, texture, or structure, but in
value. 36
Wells' Intensive image is a neatly visualizable image of the
sort associated with illuminated manuscripts and pageants of the
Middle Ages. In poetry, it is the image of Dante and, especially,
in English poetry, of Spenser. The image is not only clear but
what perhaps follows—diminutive, diagrammatic: Dante'3 Hell,
not Milton's. "Such metaphors are more often than others referred
to as emblems or symbols." The pageant figures in "Lycidas"—Camus
with his hairy mantle and sedge bonnet, and
St. Peter with his mitre and his two keys—are also Intensive
images. They are "guild" images: "pastoral" and "elegy" both
had, by Milton's time, a stock of motifs and images. There can
be stock imagery as well as stock "poetic diction." Its traditional,
institutional character and its close relation to the visual arts and
symbolic ceremony make Wells, thinking in terms of culture
history, attach the Intensive image to conservative religion, to
the medieval, the priestly, the Catholic.
The three highest categories are the Sunken, the Radical, and
the Expansive (taken, one would think, in ascending order).
Briefly, the Sunken is the image of a classical poetry} the Radical,
the image of the Metaphysicals, preeminently of Donne} and
the Expansive, the image, predominantly, of Shakespeare as
well as of Bacon and Browne and Burke. The common denomi-
nations of the three, their marks of shared altitude, are their
specifically literary character (their recalcitrance to pictorial
visualization), their internality (metaphoric thinking), the in-
terpenetration of the terms (their fruitful, procreative mar-
riage).
The Sunken image, not to be confounded with the faded or
trite, keeps "below full visibility," suggests the sensuous concrete
without definitely projecting and clearing it. Its lack of overtones
suits it to contemplative writing: its Elizabethan exemplar is
—