Respecting the Image: Elements of Modernism in Mark Strand’s Luminism

Respecting the Image: Elements of Modernism in Mark Strand’s Luminism

In a traditional sense, luminism refers to an American landscape painting style of the 1870’s, focusing on the (often sublime) effects of light in landscapes (Merriam Webster, 2011). This definition is clearly reflected in Mark Strand’s poem Luminism, as a good portion of the work reads like a textual representation of a Luminist painting, expressing the beauty and spirituality of light in nature. The poem is presented in a modern, free-verse style, with no perceptible rhyme scheme. It is written out almost matter-of-factly, a single stanza with line breaks that seem to aim mainly for uniform length of line and continuity. However, this simple presentation is in marked contrast with the poem itself, as Strand writes with a nuanced and chosen language with elements of modernism that clearly marks the piece as poetry versus a simple retelling of a past event.

Throughout the poem, Strand displays a conciseness in his descriptions and word choice. In the combination of his focus on the sunset’s brevity and his laconic writing, he perfectly reflects Ezra Pound’s ideas of what an image in poetry should be - an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” free of superfluous words and phrases.

The piece describes a memorable sunset that the author experiences with some friends in the city one evening. The poem focuses on describes his reaction to its fleeting nature and an accompanying mysterious “cry” whose meaning is left to the reader to ascertain. In his description of a sunset, Strand captures a beautiful moment in time, using the metaphor of a “golden fire” for the sun’s all-encompassing rays. He draws specific attention to the juxtaposition between the sunset’s brevity and its importance. Even though the moment of the sunset was brief, it has lasting effects in his mind, as he compares its power to a kind of sharp, recurring dream. We’ve all experienced this well-known phenomenon: that same powerful dream you have over and over, its details more clear each time you suddenly wake up from it.

His friend Philip’s cryptic commentary on the sunset midway through the poem is also striking: this moment, this segment of the sunset they experience, is just “… one in an / Infinite series of hands…” says Philip, clearly in awe of the instant. The metaphor of hands as the sun’s rays may conjure up a religious image for some: God is reaching down to Earth in this sunset, bathing all of creation in His divine light. However, there is no overt mention of religion in the poem, and overall the work itself does not have decidedly religious tones. Rather, it seems to focus on overall aesthetics, especially the representation of light, and a mysterious contrast between the moment of sunset and what happens soon after this event.

Strand does not come back to the sunset in the latter portion of the poem; instead, he finishes with commentary on an unnamed cry that rises up and begs to be explained by saying “…I had no idea what it [this cry?] meant until now.”  Many questions rise from this final musing. Do any of us know what this cry means?  Is this cry joyous or melancholy? This portion is such a departure from the earlier section that it’s hard to know what to make of it. What purpose does this final contrasting passage serve? Perhaps by focusing on the subtlety of the cry, the cry that came “so lightly [the poem’s subjects] might live out [their] lives and not know” its effect, Strand is simply asking us to heed its importance. It’s very hard to hear, but is something that has the potential to “touch us as nothing else would.”

Through his verbal portrait of a sunset, Strand urges us to pay attention to and give due importance and respect to the brief fragments of beauty and power in our lives, no matter how fleeting or minute they seem. In doing so, we may eventually come to an individual understanding of the significance of these events, much like the realization the speaker comes to at the end of the poem. Similarly, modernism’s focus on effectively distilling and encapsulating images is demonstrated by Strand in his use of concise metaphors and bold yet simple statements and observations.

Works Cited

"luminism." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2011. Merriam-Webster Online.            29 Jan 2011 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker>.