Essay: Poetry and the language of seduction

What we can speak about, however, is how a poem lures us in through language which is charged, captivating us in its blending of three crucial elements – musicality, image – making, and intellectual thought – and their cumulative effect on the human psyche. It’s hard to better this breakdown, helpfully formalised back in 1934 by Ezra Pound², though it’s how, and to what degree, each element manifests that makes a poem unique. While there may be poetic elements we can identify, there’s no formula to account for originality of thought or expression.

Let’s look at a poem’s sonic properties first. ‘Poetry has historically been defined as the organisation of thought through sound,’ writes poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield, then going further: ‘Music remains the point where any good poem begins.’³ Poems were uttered and heard before they were ever written down or read, and it was their rhythmical, often repetitive, qualities which made them so memorable in the tradition of Mnemosyne, Greek goddess of memory.

Even today, when an oral tradition is often replaced by the written word, relieving us of the need to memorise poems, we still find ourselves responding intuitively to cadence and a rhythm-driven memorability. This still holds true with the haunting repetitions or echoes in say, a villanelle, pantoum or sestina. It isn’t just a matter of beautiful-sounding words or rhyme, or the internal chiming at work in the use of devices such as assonance, consonance or alliteration, but also at a structural level with the relationship between syntax and line, the interplay of pattern and variation. At its best, this can be said to combine to generate a form of meaning through sound alone.

Consider, for instance, this short poem by Robert Graves:

  She tells her love while half asleep
  Robert Graves

  She tells her love while half asleep,
  In the dark hours,
  With half-words whispered low:
  As Earth turns in her winter sleep
  And puts out grass and flowers
  Despite the snow,
  Despite the falling snow.

This poem, in my opinion, perfectly embodies the sort of exquisite musicality that poetry can achieve. Despite its deceptively simple lines and clear echoing of sounds (asleep/sleep, hours/flowers, low/snow), there’s a deliberate slowing down created by the shorter lines and the repetition (despite/snow) in the final couplet. In just seven lines, we’re transported into the dawning of a sensuous and deeply mysterious affair. The love is still tentative, perhaps undeclared – perhaps even in the act of being realised. We’ll come back to this later.

But now let’s turn to image-making, the second element integral to most poetry. Distinguished by its oblique, tangential approach, poetry usually works by showing rather than telling, by suggesting rather than dictating, inviting the reader or listener to form their own response. The conveying of images – or, as Ezra Pound puts it, ‘the casting of images on the mind’s eye’ – becomes, therefore, vital.

Imagery can affect more than our eye; it can also be used to engage the full range of our sensory experience – what we hear, touch, taste and smell – though visual images remain by far the most prevalent. Whatever the nature of imagery, however, it connects us to the felt experience, and this takes us to the core of poetry’s power to seduce. Because a poem doesn’t aspire to tell us the facts about something so much as make us feel it; that is, to deliver an experience. As French poet and critic Paul Valéry says, ‘For a poet, it’s never enough to say that it’s raining. It’s necessary… to create rain.’⁴

The similes or metaphors which make the most impression on us tend to be those that bring together disparate objects or inner and outer worlds in a singular thrilling moment. Our memory tends to be grounded in concrete or sensory images we see on a daily basis rather than abstract ideas (such as love or beauty) and it’s often the combination of the strange and the familiar which accounts for their mesmerising quality.

Few poems summon up the strangeness in the familiar for me as succinctly as this one by the late Sydney-based poet, Antigone Kefala:

  Summer at Deverni
  Antigone Kefala

  We sink in light
  disappear in the silence
  nothing but
  the slow folding of the sea.

  Afternoon heat
  empty of voices
  on the foil surface
  heads drifting like heavy ornaments.

  At dusk
  the fishing boats
  massive dark stones
  planted
  in a field of moonstone.

Typically austere and chiselled down – almost, a fragment – this apparently unassuming poem is, by the end of the second stanza, startlingly energised by the image of heads drifting untethered on the sea ‘like heavy ornaments’, and again in the final stanza with fishing boats likened to dark stones ‘planted in a field of moonstone’ – simultaneously precise and ominous.

That language describing relatively commonplace objects like heavy ornaments and dark stones can, through imagism, be so suddenly and vitally charged is surely one of poetry’s greatest gifts. And so in this poem, for a brief moment – more, possibly – its figurative power transports us, and our vision of things rendered just a little less certain.

So far it may feel as if we’ve been talking around the process of making poetry – its effect on us and how that is achieved. But all the crafting in the world does not a poem make, and here we come to the third element in poetry’s make-up – the idea or vision behind a poem, the irresistible chemistry behind that initial creative impulse. Of course, this varies from genre to genre – from narrative poetry (which tells a story) to lyric poetry (which tends to constellate around one centre) – as well as from one writer to another.

Furthermore, many poets find that their original intention behind a poem alters in the course of its writing, that what began as one thing morphs into something else, which leads us to the notion of poetry as a journey. This is crucial, because whatever the motive behind the composition of a poem, it will be more moving if the reader or listener is actively engaged, and this in turn is more likely if the writer is on a journey of discovery too. It tends to happen when poetry does more than recount or summarise an experience, but rather re-enacts it.

If, as the poet Gregory Orr says, our daytime commitments require us to keep the chaotic nature of our impulses at bay, to control or repress them, ‘It’s possible to say that with poetry we pause and step aside for that disorder, make a place for it.’⁵

Looping back to the Robert Graves poem, we can see that it’s a beautiful example of the reader being placed firmly in the midst of a ‘disorderly’ experience – the words are not fully formed yet, the earth still turning, the snow falling. It is immersive, not retrospective, and possibly transformative.

Ancient Japanese court culture, in the Buddhist tradition, took this a stage further: ‘No significant experience was felt to be entire until it had found expression in verse … The writing of such a poem is not a statement about the experience, but part of the transformative moment itself; not the mirror of an event, but its natural completion’.⁶

Here’s a poem by the celebrated twentieth-century Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos, which I find deeply intriguing, the whole of which (in one way) is a journey:

  Miniature
  Yannis Ritsos

  The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
  begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
  like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
  made for a child’s fairy tale. The young officer sitting opposite
  is buried in the old armchair. He doesn’t look at her.
  He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
  throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup’s handle. The clock
  holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
  The moment has gone. It’s too late now. Let’s drink our tea.
  Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
  To pass by and go away? And only this carriage remains,
  with its little yellow wheels of lemon
  parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
  and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?

These lyrical and labyrinthine lines defy any easy response or interpretation which is, of course, part of their magic. A scene is unfolding, strange things are being felt – a woman’s hands are ‘sad’, the clock ‘holds its heartbeat’, and then ‘the moment’, whatever it is, has passed. There is no consoling narrative here; in fact, there’s barely a narrative at all – rather, it’s a surreal mini psychodrama, a highly distilled series of fragments.

As often with poetry, the hovering silences are tantalising, and what is not said is as important as what is. On this fascinating subject, poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert writes, ‘The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. The encounter is almost inherently frustrating, as though one could not possibly pay enough attention. This is useful: Frustration is erotic … The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.’⁷

In Ritsos’ poem, we find ourselves taken to a liminal space, unfamiliar and unpredictable, marvelling with him, ‘Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?’. We could, perhaps, say that the poem opens up an awareness that death can visit us suddenly and tragically in the midst of a daily routine like sharing a cup of tea, but this is a poem of timeless moments suspended between the time-anchored clatter of everyday life as much as what’s ‘happening’. As poet and translator Martyn Crucefix astutely observes, ‘Poetry can never be summarised by its own conclusions.’⁸

And this is where we come to what lies at the heart of how poetry enthrals. We’ve spent this time taking apart the various elements of poetry, but poetry’s language of seduction thrills us not by one or another ‘element’ but in its artful combination of all three – music, imagery and its intellectual or visionary aspect – appealing to what TS Eliot famously terms ‘the auditory imagination’; that is, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin…’.⁹

In other words, we must hear and feel a poem in all its layered complexity, open ourselves to its full-bodied allure through all our senses rather than seek a purely intellectual grasp of it or try to pin it down. Many poems – lyric poems, in particular – are the product of a meditative state, and we must be alert to the particular way the poet is shaping language. It’s all too easy to privilege semantic over sonic coherence, the literal over the metaphorical, but a poem may be exploratory, working towards the unknown or enacting the complexities of life through language itself rather than distilling them. In such cases, a poem becomes revelatory, inviting us, along with its writer, not merely to see things in a different way but to actively re-interpret them.

I remember my bewilderment when someone, quite recently, remarked to me, ‘I really liked your poem, but what did it mean?’ I proceeded to explain the context for its writing, the nature of the experiences that went into its making and so on, but though the person went away quite happily, none of this gave a sense of the poem which I felt was being lost in its attempted dismantling. This begs the question, is it possible to detach the ‘meaning’ of a poem (its intellectual element) from its style and form (its musical and imagistic elements)? Of course we can try, but I feel it’s often inherently reductive and, were it possible to do so, would the poem in question arguably be less a poem than a piece of prose?

Interestingly, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong defines the work of the writer as ‘not so much to nail anything down but to make space for the endeavour of curiosity, to widen the theatre of wonder.’ ¹⁰

That being the case, we might conclude that the work of the reader is to cultivate a corresponding receptivity to the particular form of magic a poem may offer rather than succumb, as Seamus Heaney puts it, to the ‘the pacifier of paraphrasable meaning’¹¹. If we make ourselves vulnerable, as one would with a lover, to the sound and feel of a poem as well as to its more graspable intellectual aspect, we’re allowing ourselves to be, in short, seduced.

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The collections in which the poems quoted appear are:
‘She tells her love while half asleep’, Robert Graves, Poems About Love, Doubleday, NY, 1969.
‘Summer at Deverni’, Antigone Kefala, Fragments, Giramondo, Sydney, 2016.
‘Miniature’, Yannis Ritsos (first pub. Greek, 1961), trans. Edmund Keeley, Ritsos in Parentheses, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1979.

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(Based on a lecture delivered to the Society of Women Writers NSW, State Library of NSW, 13 August 2025.)