Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons was a British poet, critic, and magazine editor who was born in 1865 and died in 1945 and was a key member of the symbolist movement. Symbolists strove to create transcendence, they believed that art should be beautiful above all else and that reality was not it's true purpose. Symbolists use lots of imagery and symbolism to make their poems seem deeper and more imaginative.

A great example of this is Symon's "White Heliotrope", found at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180846

White Heliotrope

BY ARTHUR SYMONS

The feverish room and that white bed,

The tumbled skirts upon a chair,   

The novel flung half-open, where

Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread;

The mirror that has sucked your face

Into its secret deep of deeps,

And there mysteriously keeps

Forgotten memories of grace;

And you half dressed and half awake,

Your slant eyes strangely watching me,

And I, who watch you drowsily,

With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)

Will rise, a ghost of memory, if

Ever again my handkerchief

Is scented with White Heliotrope.

 

Upon reading the poem, we see Symon's immediate personification of the room as "feverish", suggesting a sexual sin has occurred that is juxtaposed with the "white bed", which would often signify purity. We then see the imagery: "The tumbled skirts upon a chair, / The novel flung half-open, where / Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread". This gives the audience a mental picture of the scene. Then personification again, as Symons describes the "mirror that has sucked in your face / Into its secret deep of deeps". This suggests that the mirror has taken the person's "memories of grace", or virtue, referencing back to the "feverish room". The overall motif of sexuality continues as the narrator discusses his or her own "eyes that, having slept not, ache".We then learn in the final stanza that the narrator has smelled the white heliotrope on his handkerchief, and has remembered this vivid scene. The previous stanzas, we realize, have only been a memory, drawn out by the strong scent of the heliotrope. We know see the juxtaposition of the pure, white flower with the sinful, sexual scene described. Symon's poem "White Heliotrope" uses the juxtaposition of the vivid sexual scene and the scent of the pure, white heliotrope to show that love, while seemingly pure, is not always as innocent as it seems.