Chapter 8

Cognition and the creative interplay of word and image in Apollinaire’s “Il Pleut”

This chapter honours two of Peter Verdonk’s long-standing scholarly interests: first, the relationship between word and image in poetry; and second, the cognition of literary style. In his article, “Painting, poetry, parallelism: ekphrasis, stylistics and cognitive poetics”, Verdonk states that human beings have “a prevailing desire for some sort of productive interaction between word and image” (2005: 235), before going on to present a characteristically exhaustive, contextually grounded and cognitively informed analysis of the style of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Dance”. While Verdonk’s analysis focuses on an ekphrastic text which, as he explains, “is expected to call the image to mind, to conjure it up, as it were” (2005: 235), he also notes that other poetic forms, including shape poetry and concrete poetry, similarly seem to satisfy our preoccupation with vision and language. My own chapter examines one such poem, while aiming to follow the analytical principles of context-sensitivity, rigour, and theoretical experimentation which underpinned Peter’s entire scholarly career. In the analysis of Apollinaire’s famous text, “Il Pleut”, which follows, I bring traditional stylistic and literary-critical approaches into dialogue with more recent cognitive accounts of the experience of reading poetry, specifically looking at the cognition of iconicity in poetry at the very beginnings of what would become the concrete movement in the early twentieth century.