Symbol: something that represents something else

In the simplest sense, anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it---usually an idea conventionally associated with it. Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically; and words are also symbols. In the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, the term denotes a kind of sign that has no natural or resembling connection with its referent, only a conventional one: this is the case with words. In literary usage, however, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image (see imagery); that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it: roses, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common literary symbols. A symbol differs from a metaphor in that its application is left open as an unstated suggestion: thus in the sentence She was a tower of strength, the metaphor ties a concrete image (the 'vehicle': tower) to an identifiable abstract quality (the tenor: strength). Similarly, in the systematically extended metaphoric parallels of allegory, the images represent specific meanings: at the beginning of Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman ( c .1380), the tower seen by the dreamer is clearly identified with the quality of Truth, and it has no independent status apart from this function. But the symbolic tower in Robert Browning's poem '"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"' (1855), or that in W.B. Yeats's collection of poems The Tower (1928), remains mysteriously indeterminate in its possible meanings. It is therefore usually too simple to say that a literary symbol 'stands for' some idea as if it were just a convenient substitute for a fixed meaning; it is usually a substantial image in its own right, around which further significances may gather according to differing interpretations. The term symbolism refers to the use of symbols, or to a set of related symbols; however, it is also the name given to an important movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century poetry: for this sense, see symbolists. One of the important features of Romanticism and succeeding phases of Western literature was a much more pronounced reliance upon enigmatic symbolism in both poetry and prose fiction, sometimes involving obscure private codes of meaning, as in the poetry of Blake or Yeats. A well-known early example of this is the albatross in Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798). Many novelists---notably Herman Melville and D.H. Lawrence---have used symbolic methods: in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) the White Whale (and indeed almost every object and character in the book) becomes a focus for many different suggested meanings. Melville's extravagant symbolism was encouraged partly by the importance which American Transcendentalism gave to symbolic interpretation of the world.

(from Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Baldick, Chris, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. x, 361 p. Extracted from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, originally published in 2008 as a book by Oxford University Press.)