Images in Poems

Sometimes a poem will offer an image that is so striking, so simple and ordinary, and yet so powerful and beautiful, that it finds its way into a permanent corner of one's mind, coming out now and then, as one might without conscious intent draw a favorite book from the shelf, find it opening to a page so familiar that the binding itself has become accustomed to the place. So it has been for me with two poems I recall (more, but these will serve), the first by W.B.Yeats, the second by Jane Kenyon. It is interesting to me that the two are alike in place and theme.  Yeats's lines are untitled, being a self-contained part of a longer poem, a poem of memory ("Vacillation") looking back when the poet was 67 (my own age as I write these lines) :

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.



MAN EATING
by Jane Kenyon

The man at the table across from mine
is eating yogurt. His eyes, following
the progress of the spoon, cross briefly
each time it nears his face. Time,

and the world with all its principalities,
might come to an end as prophesied
by the Apostle John, but what about
this man, so completely present

to the little carton with its cool,
sweet food, which has caused no animal
to suffer, and which he is eating
with a pearl-white plastic spoon.