Poet Ezra Pound, following the lead of scholar Ernest Fenollosa, once said that Chinese was the ideal medium for poetry, as its characters, or ideograms, actually mime the very processes of nature itself. These signs, he said, form a language that visibly patterns the "primal energies of the elements."
The ideogram bears "its metaphor on its face." The sign for sun "glows" like the sun, the sign for tree "grows" like a tree, and when you combine the two ("entangling the sun radical in the branches of the tree") you have represented the concept "east."
From these observations the poet cobbled together his "ideogrammatic method," which depended upon the (incorrect) belief that the sense of Chinese characters was visibly and invariably generated by the juxtaposition of their component elements. In fact, almost all Chinese characters are phonetic compounds and thus do not speak entirely to the eye. Nonetheless this "ideogrammatic" theory has had many proponents over the years and is still used as an aide-memoire in some teaching methods.