By Ali Taha Alnobani
The Life of an Image Beyond Its Original Words
A poetic image is born within language, but does it belong exclusively to the words that first expressed it?
A moon may appear in a poem as a symbol of longing, beauty, or unattainable love. The same moon may return in a painting, a piece of music, or a cinematic scene. Its appearance may change, and its emotional associations may expand, yet something of the original imaginative experience can remain recognizable.
This possibility has interested me for many years, particularly in relation to the images that emerge unexpectedly during the writing of a poem.
Some images seem inseparable from their original language. Others appear to possess a life that extends beyond the poem in which they first appeared.
I began thinking more seriously about this distinction when I returned to The Strawberry Woman, a poem I published on Write Out Loud in March 2013, and rewrote it as a song titled Strawberry Light in 2025.
The experience raised a question that reaches beyond musical adaptation: when the words, structure, and artistic medium change, what allows a poetic image to survive?
The Strawberry as More Than a Fruit
In the original poem, I used the strawberry not simply as an object of beauty, but as the starting point for a sequence of imaginative transformations.
The strawberry becomes associated with the moon, the morning, celestial light, paradise, fire, ice, and the radiance of a beloved presence.
The images do not follow the ordinary logic of physical description.
A strawberry does not literally become a moon, nor can a woman possess the power to reveal the source of the sun’s light.
Yet poetry allows these impossible relationships to become emotionally meaningful.
The value of metaphor lies partly in its ability to place distant experiences beside one another, inviting the reader to discover a connection that ordinary language might never establish.
In The Strawberry Woman, the fruit’s colour, sweetness, and delicate appearance provide the first imaginative association. From there, the image moves toward increasingly expansive suggestions of wonder and beauty.
The beloved figure is not described through realistic physical detail. She emerges through a constellation of associations.
The strawberry is therefore less an object than a doorway.
It allows the poem to move from something familiar and earthly toward something mysterious and almost celestial.
Read the original poem, The Strawberry Woman, published in 2013:
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=34796
What Happens When an Image Is Rewritten?
More than a decade after publishing the poem, I returned to its imagery while developing a new musical work.
The song, Strawberry Light, was not intended as a literal musical setting of the original text.
I rewrote its lyrics, developed new verses and a recurring chorus, and expanded the symbolic world surrounding the central image.
The strawberry became associated more explicitly with cosmic light, stars, celestial movement, and the mysterious presence of a woman who seems to exist beyond ordinary space.
Certain images remained recognizable.
Fire and ice continued to represent the meeting of opposing qualities. The sun and moon retained their importance. Colour remained central to the emotional atmosphere.
Other elements changed substantially.
The original poem suggests beauty through a relatively compact series of images. The song creates a more extensive imaginative environment, repeatedly returning to the idea of strawberry-coloured light.
The question is whether such a transformation preserves the original image or replaces it with something different.
I believe the answer lies somewhere between these possibilities.
The language changes, but the relationship between beauty, light, desire, and the unattainable remains.
The image survives not because every detail is preserved, but because its central imaginative relationship continues to generate meaning.
A Poetic Image Is Not a Fixed Illustration
It is important to distinguish a poetic image from a literal picture.
When a poet writes about a moon associated with love, the reader does not necessarily imagine the same moon the poet imagined.
One reader may see a pale circle in a winter sky. Another may imagine a red moon rising above the sea. A third may respond primarily to the emotional suggestion rather than to any precise visual form.
The poem provides language, but the reader participates in completing the experience.
This imaginative freedom is one of poetry’s distinctive qualities.
Visual adaptation changes that relationship.
A music video may present a particular moon, a particular woman, and a particular landscape. The viewer encounters choices already made by the artist.
Those choices can intensify the emotional atmosphere, but they may also reduce the openness of the original image.
The visual work may become more immediate while leaving less room for personal interpretation.
This is not necessarily a failure.
It is a change in the artistic experience.
A poem invites the reader to imagine. A visual interpretation offers an image that the viewer may accept, question, resist, or reinterpret.
The challenge is to ensure that the image does not become merely decorative.
It should contribute something to the work’s emotional and imaginative development.
From the Written Image to the Sung Image
Music introduces another kind of transformation.
Unlike painting or film, music does not necessarily represent objects directly. It creates patterns of sound, movement, tension, expectation, and resolution.
When poetry becomes song, its verbal images enter a new relationship with rhythm, melody, vocal expression, and repetition.
A phrase that appears only once in a poem may return several times in a chorus.
An image originally encountered in silence may become associated with a recurring musical passage.
A metaphor may gain emphasis because it occurs at a moment of heightened musical intensity.
Yet these possibilities involve artistic choices, and they do not guarantee a successful result.
A musical setting can deepen the expressive possibilities of language, but it can also overwhelm a delicate image with excessive repetition or predictable emotional signals.
For this reason, adapting a poem into a song requires more than preserving a collection of attractive metaphors.
The writer must consider how those metaphors function within a new structure.
In Strawberry Light, I chose to develop the central image through a recurring lyrical refrain.
The strawberry became not merely one element among several, but a more explicit symbol around which the song’s imaginative world was organised.
This changed the balance of the original poem.
The image gained structural prominence, but it also became more defined.
Whether that change strengthens or limits the listener’s experience remains a legitimate question for criticism.
The Risk of Beautiful but Empty Images
Modern digital technologies make it increasingly easy to produce visually impressive scenes.
A glowing moon, an impossible landscape, a figure surrounded by stars, or a sea of radiant colours can now be generated without the resources traditionally required for elaborate visual production.
These possibilities are exciting, but they also create a temptation.
An image can become spectacular without becoming meaningful.
Beauty alone does not guarantee poetic depth.
The relationship between an image and the larger artistic work matters more than the number of colours, effects, or visual details it contains.
A strawberry moon may appear magnificent on a screen, but if it contributes nothing to the emotional or symbolic structure of the work, it risks becoming an ornament.
This concern is especially relevant to AI-assisted visual production.
Such tools can generate elaborate representations from descriptions, but the resulting complexity does not automatically reproduce the subtlety of a literary metaphor.
The artist must still ask why an image belongs in the work.
What does it reveal?
What emotional relationship does it establish?
What would be lost if it were removed?
These questions remain essential regardless of the technology used.
The Role of Human Intention
In developing Strawberry Light, I worked from my original poem and rewrote its lyrics for a new musical interpretation.
I used Suno AI to assist with music production, while digital editing and AI-assisted visual tools contributed to the accompanying video.
The process made me think about the difference between generating an image and giving it artistic significance.
Technology can offer possibilities, but it does not establish the meaning of the original poem.
The central imaginative relationships were present in the earlier literary work.
My task was to decide which of those relationships should remain, which could expand, and how the new form might explore them.
This does not mean that every artistic intention will succeed.
An author may believe that an image has survived a transformation, while readers or listeners may experience the new work as fundamentally different.
That difference of interpretation is not something to fear.
It is part of the life of art.
Creative intention matters, but it does not possess exclusive authority over the meaning of the finished work.
Poetry, Adaptation, and the Freedom to Change
Literary history offers many examples of works that continue to exist through translation, performance, illustration, theatre, and film.
A dramatic character may acquire new significance when performed by a different actor. A poem may suggest different associations in translation. A literary landscape may become visually recognizable through illustration while losing some of its original ambiguity.
Adaptation involves both preservation and change.
If every word and image had to remain identical, transformation would be little more than reproduction.
If nothing recognizable remained, however, the new work might have only a distant relationship with its source.
The creative problem lies between these extremes.
What must survive for a transformed work to remain connected to its origin?
Sometimes the answer is a character. Sometimes it is a narrative conflict, a recurring question, or a particular emotional atmosphere.
In the case of The Strawberry Woman and Strawberry Light, I would identify the essential connection as an imaginative relationship between the beloved, natural beauty, and celestial light.
The words are not identical.
The structure is different.
The artistic form has changed.
But the central metaphor continues to provide the foundation of the new work.
Listen to Strawberry Light, the 2025 musical reinterpretation:
Does the New Image Belong to the Old Poem?
I sometimes wonder whether a poetic image can belong permanently to any single version of a work.
The original poem remains unchanged on the page, but the reader who encounters it after hearing the song may experience it differently.
The musical interpretation can influence how the original words are remembered.
A reader may begin to associate the strawberry with the cosmic imagery developed in the later version, even though some of those details were absent from the earlier poem.
In this way, the relationship between original and adaptation can become reciprocal.
The poem gives the song its imaginative foundation.
The song, in turn, may alter the reader’s experience of the poem.
This does not erase the distinction between them.
The earlier work retains its literary independence, and the new work should be judged on its own artistic merits.
But the two can exist in conversation.
For me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of returning to older poetry.
A poem written many years ago may reveal possibilities that its author did not fully anticipate.
The image that once emerged through language may later invite music, painting, or cinematic interpretation.
Its survival depends not on remaining motionless, but on retaining something meaningful through change.
What Remains After the Transformation?
When I look back at The Strawberry Woman, I encounter a poem shaped by a particular moment in my literary life.
When I consider Strawberry Light, I encounter another creative moment, separated from the first by more than a decade and influenced by different artistic tools.
Neither work needs to invalidate the other.
The original poem offers a concentrated experience of metaphor and imaginative suggestion.
The song explores a related symbolic world through expanded lyrics, repetition, and musical production.
The visual adaptation introduces yet another interpretation.
Perhaps a poetic image survives because it is never entirely exhausted by its first expression.
Its meaning remains open to memory, transformation, disagreement, and rediscovery.
But survival is not guaranteed.
An image may become richer through adaptation, or it may lose the ambiguity that once gave it power.
The responsibility of the artist is not merely to preserve its recognizable appearance, but to remain attentive to the relationships that made it meaningful.
I would be interested to hear how other poets approach this question:
When a poetic image moves from written language into music or visual art, what matters most: preserving its original form, retaining its emotional meaning, or allowing it to become something entirely new?
