19 pages • 38 minutes read
For A Poet
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Symbols & Motifs
Silken Cloth
The silken cloth is the most significant object in the poem, mentioned in three of its eight lines. It provides a vivid sensation that grounds the poem’s metaphorical abstraction and adds further characterization to the speaker as someone who would choose silk, rather than prosaic cloth or disdainful burlap, in which to wrap their dreams. The choice of silk suggests the level of care the speaker has for their dreams, the tenderness with which they would wrap them and keep them hidden away. The preciousness of silk signifies the speaker is not likely to relinquish these dreams, and rather than abandon them, is enfolding them in a delicate keepsake. Silk also symbolizes intimacy, the lavish closeness of lovers, and the thoughtfulness of self-care, as Cullen repeats the sensuous image three times. This furthers the eroticism suggested by the moth by implying a further facet of the lovers’ relationship. The silken cloth also carries a further implication, coupling with the other facet of the moth, the decay, in its usage to cover the box of gold that contains the dreams. The silken cloth becomes a burial shroud, a final delicate layer meant to contain and conceal that which has died and been laid to rest underneath.
Burial
A motif of burial is suggested throughout “For a Poet.” The emphatic action of the speaker evokes a burial; wrapping a delicate cloth, or a shroud, over a box of gold that contains unachieved dreams, which can equally be read as a coffin. Cullen’s use of the phrase “laid them away” (Line 2) furthers this emphasis with its similarity to the common phrase of “laying to rest,” which usually references funerals and the act of burial. These images, and Cullen’s allusion to the common phrase, coupled with the natural sense of decay and abandonment conjured by the presence of the moth, all work toward creating a funereal atmosphere that underscores the metaphorical action of burying one’s dreams away for good.
A second sort of burial is also implied by the poem. Again, the burial is metaphorical; it speaks more to the method of repression Cullen employs when he suppresses his dreams by placing them in a gold box before hiding them from his mind’s eye. This second burial, deep within the self, is not the ceremony marking a passing, but rather an active form of psychological survival against the pain of unfulfilled dreams. The emphatic use of negative characterization—Cullen swears he feels neither hate nor anger but does not state what he actually does feel—in Lines 5 and 6 is suggestive of this second kind of psychological burial.
The Moth
The moth functions as a complicated symbol in “For a Poet,” where it comes to represent death, decay, and eroticism. Its immediate use within the poem is as a symbol of the presence of the former love, likely John Gaston Edgar, Cullen’s probable lover to whom the poem is dedicated. The moth’s presence remains by the dreams, unable to leave them, lingering around their interment, peppering the box of gold with kisses that also signify decay. This decay, common to anyone who has attempted to store clothing, only to have it eaten by ever-zealous moths, casts a further light over the speaker’s emotional position in the poem; it is not the freshness of a recent wound that moths gather around, but only that of a concluded and abandoned matter. The moth is also commonly used to indicate death—particularly of a self-incurred kind—through the notion of a moth’s suicidal flight toward a flame or other light source. In this, the tragedy of Icarus is evoked, and with that the rashness of youth, of rushed desire and disastrous consequences, all of which speak to the failed relationship indicated by the dedication to Edgar.
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