No Images

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1973

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

It would be an oversimplification to classify William Waring Cuney’s poem as free verse. It appears not to follow conventional expectations for prosody. The lines are irregular in length, do not follow any rhythmic pattern, and do not abide by any conventional notion of rhyming (end rhymes, slant rhymes, or near rhymes). Yet the poem is anything but free verse—if free verse means associative, as if the poet simply follows a train of thought and then structures lines to resemble poetry.

Cuney’s first love was music. Like lines of music, “No Images” happens most immediately in the ear. It should be read aloud, or even better sung. Cuney composed the poem in his late teens when he harbored ambitions to be a classical singer. He had discovered both blues and the earliest expressions of jazz in college and then more so when he moved to New York. To embody the feel of song, the poem uses the pronoun “she” to create a unified sonic feel, a kind of refrain with its lingering “sh” sounds and its sweet, luscious long “e” inviting soulful delivery. Listening to Nina Simone sing her composition based on the poem testifies to this rich aural effect.

The poem also uses a pattern of long vowels (most notably “e” and o” sounds), sibilant “s” sounds (and “sh” sounds), and languorous “l” sounds to gently slow the recitation to mimic the feel of the wounded heart typical of the blues. Cuney manipulates vowel and consonant sounds to recreate the feel of the blues. For instance, the closing fragment is two simple words: “no images” (Line 13). They can be said quickly—they are, after all, just four quick counts. Imagine, however, the line being sung like the blues. That line defines the tragedy of the woman of color. The sounds create the pain, the sorrow, of the woman at the sink. The “no” can be delivered slowly and meditatively, drawn out for effect, and the word “images” is a complex sonic unit that defies the three-beats of the conversational word. The word offers the lingering “m” sound and ends with a drawn out “s” that invites a feeling of loss and emptiness that matches the dark emotional mood of the woman herself.

Speaker

There is a haunting loneliness at the heart of the poem. Cuney plays a variation on the conventional relationship between a speaker in a poem and the subject of that poem. In a conventional poem, there is a presumed intimacy between the speaker and the subject, a close, emotional bond that justifies the poet elevating the subject into poetry. Sometimes the subject is an object or a scene but, as here, the subject can be a person.

The variation here is that relationship. The poem raises the question of who is the speaker is, as there is no context for why the woman of color washing dishes in a restaurant entrances the speaker. The poem offers no narrative, no background, nothing to hint at how or why the speaker has created the poem. The woman and the speaker are evidently strangers. Because there is no interaction between the two, no dialogue, no acknowledgment of one another, the device of the speaker here creates distance rather than intimacy.

Despite being the subject of the poem and the object of the speaker’s contemplation, the woman in the restaurant stays isolated, alone, as she hunches over the sink amid the chaos and confusion typical at a mid-city restaurant. The impact she has on the speaker goes unrecognized. And the speaker stays as anonymous and as separate as the woman herself.

Irony

The poem operates on a subtle kind of irony. The tragedy of the poem is that the woman of color working at the restaurant, displaced from her native culture of palm trees and sparkling rivers, never understands her beauty, because in her adopted culture there are only images of white beauty, white grace, white glory. Because there are “no images” (Line 13) to suggest the beauty and glory of her race, she toils away in the restaurant, her beauty unsuspected, her self-esteem crippled.

Therein lies the poem’s redemptive irony. In its use of an image—a woman washing dishes—the poem elevates that figure to a thing of beauty. Cuney in fact offers in the poem the very image to which the woman has no access. The poem itself elevates the woman of color to art, to beauty and power, glory and feeling. If the street offers no images and if she can find no reflection of her beauty in the dirty dish water, she can find elevation and celebration in the poem itself. If the woman at the sink is not aware of the poet’s message, Cuney’s poem offers that redemptive energy to his readers.