International and national perspectives in poetry

¶ … Imagery in the Poetry of Levine and Amichai

Philip Levine, "The Survivor"

Philip Levine's poem "The Survivor" (Gillam 48) establishes from the first line a haunting tension between presence and absence, substance and emptiness, transience and eternity. Through his use of contrasting word choice and imagery, Levine suspends the reader at a midpoint between these opposing states.

The tension arises before the poem even begins. The title, "The Survivor," and the dedication, "In Memory of my Cousin, David Ber Prishkulnick," stand in ironic opposition to one another. By giving what appears to be an elegy the title "The Survivor," Levine introduces instability into the reader's mind: on the one hand, the dedicatee is clearly dead, but on the other, there is some element of him that defies death.

The opposition continues through Levine's use of substantial and insubstantial imagery. In the first stanza, the poet remembers the cousin saying that "Home is here…" (2) while reaching out and "touch[ing] nothing" (4). The vagueness of the gesture contrasts sharply with the specificity of the word "here." In the second stanza, the cousin as a young man has fled for his life, "sleeping nowhere, eating nothing" (19-20) and yet in the next instance he is concretely present, with "feet…swinging/…holding a sack of warm rolls" (24-27). The reader has hardly processed the feeling of the cousin's empty stomach before he is presented with the heat and weight of the warm rolls.

The final stanza presents the most poignant opposition, the simultaneous presence and absence of the cousin in death. The stanza starts with solid, tangible elements: "Gray suit, woolen vest, / collar, tie" (29-30). Immediately, this concrete presence, like the cousin himself, dissolves into "atoms / of gasoline and air" (31-32). The reader is left with a literal sense of haunting, of an existence that does not quite exist and a presence that, like the "home" of the first stanza, cannot quite be pinpointed.

Yehuda Amichai, "Huleikat -- the Third Poem About Dicky"

Like Levine, Yehuda Amichai uses word choice and imagery to establish contrasts and build tension in the poem "Huleikat -- the Third Poem About Dicky" (McClatchy 313). This poem is also about someone close to the poet who has passed, but instead of juxtaposing presence and absence as Levine did, Amichai instead contrasts terror and joy, youth and death, and violence and peace.

The first opposition is built in the first stanza, where the poet points out the reversal of age and wisdom brought about by Dicky's early death. Before he died, Dicky was "four years older [and]…like a father" (3) to the poet. But Amichai has continued past Dicky into old age, and now he is "[the] father, old and grieving" (6).

The contrasts become more concrete as the poem progresses. The third stanza sets "the departure to terrible battles" (11) against the light, bright imagery of "gardens and windows / and children playing" (12-13). The tension established by this image of soldiers marching through blossoms and children's playgrounds sets the reader up for the more sophisticated contrasts and philosophical implications of the conclusion of the poem.