Symbolism in Poetry: Illustrated Examples

Symbolism is examined two ways, and most aspirants prepare for only one. There are questions that ask what an image stands for in a given poem — and there are questions about the Symbolist Movement itself: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Arthur Symons, and the route by which French poetics reached Yeats and Eliot. This guide covers both, because the second set is where marks are actually lost.

What a symbol is, precisely

A symbol is a concrete thing — an object, figure, action or colour — that carries meaning beyond itself without abandoning its literal existence. The rose in a poem remains a rose. It also means something else, and the something else is not fixed.

That last point is what separates a symbol from every neighbouring device, and it is where examiners set their traps.

The metaphor and symbol boundary catches people. In a metaphor both terms are on the page — you are told the comparison. In a symbol only the vehicle appears, and the reader supplies the rest. That is why a symbol can mean several things at once and a metaphor usually cannot.

The allegory boundary is easier once you hold the criterion. Allegory is closed: Animal Farm assigns each figure a historical counterpart, and reading it correctly means matching them. Symbolism is open: Yeats’s tower means several things simultaneously and never resolves into one.

Three kinds of symbol

Universal or archetypal. Meanings that recur across cultures — light for knowledge, water for life and purification, the journey for a life, spring for renewal. Jung’s collective unconscious and Frye’s archetypal criticism both build on these.

Conventional or cultural. Fixed within a tradition rather than across all of them. The cross in Christian writing, the lotus in Indian poetry, the rose in the courtly love tradition. These require cultural knowledge, and questions on Indian English poetry frequently depend on them.

Private or personal. Invented by the poet and meaningful only within that poet’s work. Yeats’s gyres and tower, Blake’s Urizen, Plath’s bell jar. These are examined most often, because knowing them proves you have read the poet rather than a summary.

The Symbolist Movement

This is the part of the topic that generates the harder questions, and the part most revision notes omit.

Symbolism as a movement began in France in the 1850s and reached its height in the 1880s and 1890s, in reaction against realism in fiction and against the descriptive precision of Parnassian poetry. The Symbolists held that poetry should not describe the world but evoke a state — that meaning should be suggested rather than stated, and that the poem’s music mattered as much as its sense.

The French poets

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) is the point of origin. Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and particularly the sonnet Correspondances gave the movement its founding idea: that the material world is a forest of symbols corresponding to a spiritual reality, and that the senses answer one another — sound, scent and colour translating into each other. This is synaesthesia as a poetic principle rather than an occasional effect.

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) took suggestion furthest. To name an object, he argued, destroys most of the pleasure of a poem; the point is to suggest it. His Tuesday evening gatherings drew the younger writers, and his difficulty became the movement’s signature.

Paul Verlaine (1844–96) supplied the emphasis on musicality — de la musique avant toute chose, music before everything — and his Les Poètes maudits (1884) named the group for a wider public.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) contributed the theory of the poet as seer, deranging the senses systematically to reach visionary knowledge, and abandoned poetry entirely at twenty.

The manifesto came from Jean Moréas in 1886, published in Le Figaro, which gave the movement its name.

How it reached English poetry

The transmission runs through one book, and questions ask about it.

Arthur Symons published The Symbolist Movement in Literature in 1899, dedicating it to W.B. Yeats. It introduced Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud to English readers, and its effect on the next generation was decisive. T.S. Eliot read it as a student and later said it changed the course of his life — it sent him to Laforgue, whose ironic self-division shaped Prufrock.

So the line runs: Baudelaire → Mallarmé and Verlaine → Symons (1899) → Yeats and Eliot → Anglo-American Modernism. Learn it as a chain. Chronology and influence questions use it.

Worked examples

Blake — The Tyger

The tiger burning bright in the forests of the night is not a description of an animal. It carries the poem’s whole theological problem: what kind of creator makes something this beautiful and this dangerous, and did the same hand make the lamb? Blake’s symbols work in opposed pairs across Songs of Innocence and of Experience, so the tiger means most when read against its companion.

Blake also built a private mythology — Urizen, Los, Orc — which places him among the personal symbolists despite predating the movement by a century.

Yeats — The Second Coming

The rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem is the most quoted symbol in modern English poetry, and it is genuinely open: a new historical order, the collapse of Christian civilisation, the violence Yeats saw in post-war Europe and in Ireland.

Behind it sits Yeats’s private system, set out in A Vision (1925): history moving through gyres, interlocking spirals each two thousand years long, one unwinding as the next tightens. The falcon at the poem’s opening is turning in one of them. Knowing the system converts this from a striking image into a coherent argument — and Yeats’s symbolism is examined precisely because it rewards that knowledge.

The Byzantium poems use the golden bird and the holy city as symbols of art outlasting the body, and they belong to the same system.

Eliot — The Waste Land

The title is the symbol. Eliot took the waste land from Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and the Grail legend, where the land lies barren because the Fisher King is wounded — a landscape whose sterility is spiritual, not agricultural.

Water accordingly carries two meanings at once: absent, it is the salvation the poem cannot reach; present, in the drowning of Phlebas, it is death. That doubleness is symbolism working properly. A symbol that means one thing is doing less than its job.

Eliot’s own contribution to the theory is the objective correlative, from his essay on Hamlet (1919): the idea that emotion in art must be conveyed through a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which will evoke that emotion without stating it. It is a Symbolist principle in critical language, and it is examined regularly.

Dickinson — Because I could not stop for Death

Death as a courteous carriage driver is personification that becomes symbolic through the journey: past the school, the fields, the setting sun. The carriage ride symbolises the passage out of time, and the poem’s calm is the effect of letting the symbol carry what direct statement could not.

Frost — The Road Not Taken

Worth including because it is so often misread. The two roads symbolise choice — but the poem’s point is that the roads were really about the same, and that the speaker anticipates telling the story later “with a sigh”, making the difference up. The symbol is not the road; it is our need to give our choices retrospective significance.

Questions have been set on this misreading. If an option treats the poem as straightforwardly celebrating individualism, it is likely the distractor.

Tagore — Where the Mind is Without Fear

The mind without fear, the head held high, the world not broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls — each image symbolises a condition of national and spiritual freedom. The walls are the poem’s central symbol: caste, sectarian division, colonial partition of a people from itself. Gitanjali (English version 1912) works throughout by this method, which is one reason the Symbolist comparison is often drawn with Tagore.

Symbolism in Indian English poetry

A frequently under-prepared area, and one where cultural symbols matter.

Sarojini Naidu draws on Indian conventional symbols — the palanquin, bangles, the henna — where each carries social meaning that a reader outside the tradition would miss. Nissim Ezekiel uses the night, the city and the enterprise of the journey as symbols of a self trying to locate itself. A.K. Ramanujan works with the house, the river and inherited family objects as symbols of continuity and rupture between generations.

When a question sets an Indian English poem, ask first whether an image is carrying conventional cultural weight before treating it as personal invention.

The poetry themes that recur most often in the paper →

How this is tested

Movement questions. Who founded Symbolism, who wrote the 1886 manifesto, who wrote The Symbolist Movement in Literature and in what year, which English poets it influenced. These are the questions candidates miss, and they are pure recall.

Term distinction. Symbol against metaphor, image, allegory, or conceit. Know the criterion for each, not just an example.

Poem-specific identification. What a named symbol represents in a named poem. Read the standard readings for the canonical poems above.

Unseen passage. An extract you have not studied, with a question about its symbolic meaning. Method below.

Matching. Poet against private symbol — Yeats and the gyre, Blake and Urizen, Plath and the bell jar, Eliot and the waste land.

Reading an unseen passage symbolically

1. Find what recurs. A symbol almost always appears more than once, or occupies a structurally prominent position — the title, the opening, the final line.
2. Test whether it exceeds its function. Does the image do more work than the literal sense requires? Unnecessary weight is the sign.
3. Read the context around it. The words attached to a symbol tell you which of its possible meanings the poem is activating.
4. Resist closing it. If your reading resolves the symbol into a single equivalent, you have probably reduced it. Hold two meanings where the poem supports two.

The full method for analysing a poem under exam conditions →

Where candidates lose marks

Confusing the movement with the device. Capital S and lower-case s. The commonest error on this topic.

Treating every image as a symbol. Most images are just images. A symbol points beyond itself and usually recurs.

Reducing a symbol to one meaning. If it has only one, reconsider whether it is a symbol at all.

Missing the Symons link. The 1899 book is how French Symbolism entered English poetry, and it is asked about by name.

Reading Yeats without the system. The gyres, the phases of the moon, A Vision — his symbols are not free-floating, and questions assume you know that.

Check your understanding

Write out full answers. Each targets a boundary the paper exploits.

1. Distinguish symbol from metaphor using a criterion, not an example.
2. Name four French Symbolist poets and one work by each.
3. Who wrote The Symbolist Movement in Literature, in what year, and to whom was it dedicated?
4. Explain Eliot’s objective correlative and connect it to Symbolist practice.
5. Explain why water in The Waste Land cannot be assigned a single meaning.
6. Take an unfamiliar poem and apply the four-step method above to one image in it.

Common questions