Poet, visual artist and NCW tutor Helen Ivory shares her advice for using symbolism and imagery in your poetry.
In this article, Helen discusses how symbolism and imagery can be harness in poetry, including examples from Sylvia Plath and Simon Armitage.
We have also included a sample exercise from our upcoming Kickstart Your Poetry 12-week course, starting 21 September 2026, led by Helen Ivory. This will give you a taste of what to expect in the course. Payment plans are available!
A large part of being a poet is thinking of yourself as a poet.
When you think of yourself as a poet you give yourself permission to start collecting images and ideas that feel significant. And why do you collect anything? Nothing is arbitrary. There may be a fizz or electrical charge you feel as you see a crow in the branch of a tree. It’s an ordinary sight, sure enough – but thinking as a poet summons everything you know about the crow. it’s not just a member of the Corvidae family – in some cultures it is a symbol of death. In short, it has a whole backstory, little to do with feather and bone – it’s about association. Crows are resourceful and would have been spotted eating the dead on battlefields, thus earning them an unsavoury reputation. But look – now the crow in the tree is joined by another, turning sorrow into joy.
Symbolism is a strand of poetic imagery whereby an image represents something other than just itself. It works differently to metaphor because it can stand alone without the comparison that metaphor needs. The crow is a widely recognised symbol, it flies through folklore and has a huge say in poetry, most notably in the work of Ted Hughes. Let’s think of something smaller and more domestic – a commonplace object like a cup. Can you think of a cup on its own, without context? Can you think of the cup you are imagining without thinking of the idea of cup-ness? In what context might a cup be used? Can you think of a cup without baggage? Ok, let’s start again – what’s the first association you have with sun? Now – how about gutter, cheese, roundabout? It’s hard to divest things of their everything.
In her essay A Comparison, Sylvia Plath compares a poem to a novel. She writes: I have never put a toothbrush into a poem. To paraphrase her, a poem is too small to hide a toothbrush in; the toothbrush becomes significant.
Say you put a commonplace cup into a poem, it can become more than a drinking vessel.
An empty cup could be symbolic of vacancy; not just a lack of tea left in the pot – perhaps an emotional poverty if the cup sits on the middle of a table between two people. And perhaps the lack of tea in the pot is not just a fact, maybe it is symbolic of the end of the relationship. Nobody goes to the shop; nobody warms the pot – the love is gone. There is so much that can be said without actually saying this explicitly, by placing a hard-working symbol in a poem. The trick is to trust your reader to pick up the signs you left for them and not to direct them.
There is a saying among creative writing tutors: show not tell which is shorthand for everything I’ve just said. So if anyone asks you to show not tell – show them something like a crow on a kitchen table next to an empty teacup and let them work it out. Most poetry readers like to work things out. Not in a there is a right answer kind of way – more when I read this poem, I feel this; it makes me think of that. I think that reading a poem is a collaboration between the writer and the reader. The poem unpacks itself in the reader’s head; it’s what can connect the writer and reader through time and space.
I think that reading a poem is a collaboration between the writer and the reader. The poem unpacks itself in the reader’s head; it’s what can connect the writer and reader through time and space.
Exercise Taster
This exercise is about creating original metaphors. A metaphor works by comparing one thing directly to another. It comes from the Greek to carry. In the example we are using for this exercise, Not the Furniture Game by Simon Armitage which works like a character description, take the image: His shadow was an open cast mine. It places two things in your head: His shadow and an open cast mine. As well as showing how immense this person is, it also elicits an element of danger. If you fall into his shadow, you fall deep under the earth. What else can you see in this image? How does it make you feel? This metaphor grows in its power in the context of the rest of the poem’s imagery.
Now think of a person you know who is complex and possibly dangerous or perhaps a little frightening. If you cannot think of somebody, invent them. It could be a teacher you had at school, somebody you see around town and nothing about, or it could be a somebody you know well. Use Armitage’s poem as a model and build up a picture of them using metaphor and imagery – go as wild as you like. If that person was a teacher, you might want to use classroom metaphors: ‘She was white chalk screamed on a blackboard’ for example. Once you have a picture, break the stanza and make something happen in a much shorter stanza. You do not necessarily have to say what it is, just say what the effect is. Break the stanza again, and allow a further snippet of the effects of your protagonist – or perhaps on your protagonist – to leak out.
Not the Furniture Game
His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney
and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in
and his blink was a cat flap
and his teeth were bluestones or Easter Island statues
and his bite was a perfect horseshoe.
His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded.
And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt
and his last smile was a caesarean section
and his tongue was an iguanodon
and his whistle was a laser beam
and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough.
He coughed, and it was malt whiskey.
And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards
and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing-line
and his neck was a bandstand
and his Adam’s apple was a ballcock
and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle.
His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.
And his wrists were ankles
and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub
and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits
and the palms of this hands were action paintings
and both thumbs were blue touchpaper.
And his shadow was an opencast mine.
And his dog was a sentry-box with no one in it
and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children
and his nipples were timers for incendiary devices
and his shoulder-blades were two butchers at the meat-cleaving competition
and his belly-button was the Falkland Islands
and his private parts were the Bermuda triangle
and his backside was a priest hole
and his stretchmarks were the tide going out.
The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease.
And his legs were depth charges
and his knees were fossils waiting to be tapped open
and his ligaments were rifles wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards
and his calves were the undercarriages of Shackletons.
The balls of his feet were where meteorites had landed
and his toes were a nest of mice under the lawn-mower.
And his footprints were Vietnam
and his promises were hot-air balloons floating over the trees
and his one-liners were footballs through other people’s windows
and his grin was the Great Wall of China as seen from the moon
and the last time they talked, it was apartheid.
She was a chair, tipped over backwards
with his donkey jacket on her shoulders.
They told him,
and his face was a hole
where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.
The above exercise appears in Module Four: White Space of our upcoming Kickstart Your Poetry 12-week course. Find out more →
Helen Ivory
Helen Ivory is poet and visual artist who makes shadowboxes, collage and needlefelt creatures. She edits IS&T, teaches and mentors for Arvon, The Poetry School and NCW. Her sixth Bloodaxe collection Constructing a Witch (2024) was a PBS Winter Recommendation and last summer was translated into Greek and published by Thraka.
A poem from her surrealist chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City (SurVision 2019) is one of the Poems on the Underground. Her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US in 2023. She is the grateful recipient of an Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, and has just been awarded an Authors Foundation Grant to work on Elfshot, her new collection for Bloodaxe.
Kickstart Your Poetry (12-week course)
Ready to immerse yourself in the art of poetry?
Blossom as a poet with this inspiring poetry course online. Explore imagery, metaphor, voice, layout, rhythm, and rhyme as you create a striking portfolio of original poems with personalised tutor support.
Course led by Helen Ivory, who will be giving regular feedback, plus a one-to-one tutorial towards the end of the course.
Starts Monday 21 September, 12 weeks. Course costs £495*.
*Payment plans are available. Contact us at academy@nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk for more information.
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