week 2

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

—G. K. Chesterton

WHY SPEAK FIGURATIVELY?

“I will speak daggers to her, but use none,” says Hamlet, preparing to confront his mother. His statement makes sense only because we realize that daggers is to be taken two ways: literally (denoting sharp, pointed weapons) and nonliterally (referring to something that can be used likeweapons—namely, words). Reading poetry, we often meet comparisons between two things whose similarity we have never noticed before. When Marianne Moore observes that a fir tree has “an emerald turkey-foot at the top,” the result is a pleasure that poetry richly affords: the sudden recognition of likenesses.

A treetop like a turkey-foot, words like daggers—such comparisons are called figures of speech. In its broadest definition, a figure of speech may be said to occur whenever a speaker or writer, for the sake of freshness or emphasis, departs from the usual denotations of words. Certainly, when Hamlet says he will speak daggers, no one expects him to release pointed weapons from his lips, for daggers is not to be read solely for its denotation. Its connotations—sharp, stabbing, piercing, wounding—also come to mind, and we see ways in which words and daggers work alike. (Words too can hurt: by striking through pretenses, possibly, or by wounding their hearer’s self-esteem.) In the statement “A razor is sharper than an ax,” there is no departure from the usual denotations of razor and ax, and no figure of speech results. Both objects are of the same class; the comparison is not offensive to logic. But in King Lear’s “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child,” the objects—snake’s tooth (fang) and ungrateful offspring—are so unlike that no reasonable comparison may be made between them. To find similarity, we attend to the connotations of serpent’s tooth— biting, piercing, venom, pain—rather than to its denotations. If we are aware of the connotations of red rose (beauty, softness, freshness, and so forth), then the line “My love is like a red, red rose” need not call to mind a woman with a scarlet face and a thorny neck.

Figures of speech are not devices to state what is demonstrably untrue. Indeed they often state truths that more literal language cannot communicate; they call attention to such truths; they lend them emphasis.

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson: THE EAGLE

1851

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

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This brief poem is rich in figurative language. In the first line, the phrase crooked hands may surprise us. An eagle does not have hands, we might protest; but the objection would be a quibble, for evidently Tennyson is indicating exactly how an eagle clasps a crag, in the way that human fingers clasp a thing. By implication, too, the eagle is a person. Close to the sun, if taken literally, is an absurd exaggeration, the sun being a mean distance of 93,000,000 miles from the earth. For the eagle to be closer to it by the altitude of a mountain is an approach so small as to be insignificant. But figuratively, Tennyson conveys that the eagle stands above the clouds, perhaps silhouetted against the sun, and for the moment belongs to the heavens rather than to the land and sea. The word ringed makes a circle of the whole world’s horizons and suggests that we see the world from the eagle’s height; the wrinkled sea becomes an aged, sluggish animal; mountain walls, possibly literal, also suggests a fort or castle; and finally the eagle itself is likened to a thunderbolt in speed and in power, perhaps also in that its beak is—like our abstract conception of a lightning bolt—pointed. How much of the poem can be taken literally? Only he clasps the crag, he stands, he watches, he falls. The rest is made of figures of speech. The result is that, reading Tennyson’s poem, we gain a bird’s-eye view of sun, sea, and land—and even of bird. Like imagery, figurative language refers us to the physical world.

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William Shakespeare: SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER’S DAY? (SONNET 18)

1609

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

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And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair° from fair sometimes declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,°

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Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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METAPHOR AND SIMILE

· Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

· Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Chapter 24

24 SYMBOL

A symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion.

—John Ciardi

The national flag is supposed to stir our patriotic feelings. When a black cat crosses his path, a superstitious man shivers, foreseeing bad luck. To each of these, by custom, our society expects a standard response. A flag, a black cat crossing one’s path—each is a symbol: a visible object or action that suggests some further meaning in addition to itself. In literature, a symbol might be the word flag or the words a black cat crossed his path or every description of flag or cat in an entire novel, story, play, or poem.

A flag and the crossing of a black cat may be called conventional symbols, since they can have a conventional or customary effect on us. Conventional symbols are also part of the language of poetry, as we know when we meet the red rose, emblem of love, in a lyric, or the Christian cross in the devotional poems of George Herbert. More often, however, symbols in literature have no conventional, long-established meaning, but particular meanings of their own. In Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, to take a rich example, whatever we associate with the great white whale is not attached unmistakably to white whales by custom. Though Melville tells us that men have long regarded whales with awe and relates Moby Dick to the celebrated fish that swallowed Jonah, the reader’s response is to one particular whale, the creature of Herman Melville. Only the experience of reading the novel in its entirety can give Moby Dick his particular meaning.

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THE MEANINGS OF A SYMBOL

As Eudora Welty has observed, it is a good thing Melville made Moby Dick a whale, a creature large enough to contain all that critics have found in him. A symbol in literature, if not conventional, has more than just one meaning. In “The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe, the appearance of a strange black bird in the narrator’s study is sinister; and indeed, if we take the poem seriously, we may even respond with a sympathetic shiver of dread. Does the bird mean death, fate, melancholy, the loss of a loved one, knowledge in the service of evil? All of these, perhaps. Like any well-chosen symbol, Poe’s raven sets off within the reader an unending train of feelings and associations.

We miss the value of a symbol, however, if we think it can mean absolutely anything we wish. If a poet has any control over our reactions, the poem will guide our responses in a certain direction.

T. S. Eliot: THE BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT

1917

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript

Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

When evening quickens faintly in the street,

Wakening the appetites of life in some

And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,

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I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning

Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld,

If the street were time and he at the end of the street,

And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”

The newspaper, whose name Eliot purposely repeats so monotonously, indicates what this poem is about. Now defunct, the Transcript covered in detail the slightest activity of Boston’s leading families and was noted for the great length of its obituaries. Eliot, then, uses the newspaper as a symbol for an existence of boredom, fatigue (Wearily), petty and unvarying routine (since an evening newspaper, like night, arrives on schedule). The Transcript evokes a way of life without zest or passion, for, opposed to people who read it, Eliot sets people who do not: those whose desires revive, not expire, when the working day is through. Suggestions abound in the ironic comparison of the Transcript’s readers to a cornfield late in summer. To mention only a few: the readers sway because they are sleepy; they vegetate; they are drying up; each makes a rattling sound when turning a page. It is not necessary that we know the remote and similarly disillusioned friend to whom the speaker might nod: La Rochefoucauld, whose cynical Maxims entertained Parisian society under Louis XIV (sample: “All of us have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others”). We understand that the nod is symbolic of an immense weariness of spirit. We know nothing about Cousin Harriet, whom the speaker addresses, but imagine from the greeting she inspires that she is probably a bore.

If Eliot wishes to say that certain Bostonians lead lives of sterile boredom, why does he couch his meaning in symbols? Why doesn’t he tell us directly what he means? These questions imply two assumptions not necessarily true: first, that Eliot has a message to impart; second, that he is concealing it. We have reason to think that Eliot did not usually have a message in mind when beginning a poem, for as he once told a critic: “The conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing are more those of a quasi-musical nature . . . than of a conscious exposition of ideas.” Poets sometimes discover what they have to say while in the act of saying it. And it may be that in his Transcript poem, Eliot is saying exactly what he means. By communicating his meaning through symbols instead of statements, he may be choosing the only kind of language appropriate to an idea of great subtlety and complexity. (The paraphrase “Certain Bostonians are bored” hardly begins to describe the poem in all its possible meanings.) And by his use of symbolism, Eliot affords us the pleasure of finding our own entrances to his poem.

This power of suggestion that a symbol contains is, perhaps, its greatest advantage. Sometimes, as in the following poem by Emily Dickinson, a symbol will lead us from a visible object to something too vast to be perceived.

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Emily Dickinson: THE LIGHTNING IS A YELLOW FORK

(about 1870)

The Lightning is a yellow Fork

From Tables in the sky

By inadvertent fingers dropt

The awful Cutlery

Of mansions never quite disclosed

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And never quite concealed

The Apparatus of the Dark

To ignorance revealed.

If the lightning is a fork, then whose are the fingers that drop it, the table from which it slips, the household to which it belongs? The poem implies this question without giving an answer. An obvious answer is “God,” but can we be sure? We wonder, too, about these partially lighted mansions: if our vision were clearer, what would we behold?

Emily Dickinson: “The Lightning is a yellow Fork” reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT

The often complex and indirect way in which symbols communicate their meanings led to a group of nineteenth-century French poets being dubbed Symbolists. (This elegant moniker was their second name; their early critics had originally condemned them as the “decadent” poets.) Eventually becoming an international literary movement, the Symbolists began with poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stephane Mallarme. Influenced by sources as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman Catholic ritual, and drugs, they tried to write poetry that resembled music. They avoided direct statement and exposition for powerful evocation and suggestion. Symbolists also considered the poet as a seer who could look beyond the mundane aspects of the everyday world to capture visions of a higher and frequently occult reality. Their poems were often musical, evocative, and mysterious. Many critics consider the Symbolist Movement the beginning of Modernist literature, and both its poetry and theory had a major impact on later writers such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. But in this chapter when we speak of symbolism (with a small s) we mean an element in certain poems, not Symbolism, a specific literary movement.

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IDENTIFYING SYMBOLS

“But how am I supposed to know a symbol when I see one?” The best approach is to read poems closely, taking comfort in the likelihood that it is better not to notice symbols at all than to find significance in every literal stone and huge meanings in every thing. In looking for the symbols in a poem, pick out all the references to concrete objects—newspapers, black cats, twisted pins. Consider these with special care. Notice any that the poet emphasizes by detailed description, by repetition, or by placing it at the very beginning or end of the poem. Ask: What is the poem about, what does it add up to? If, when the poem is paraphrased, the paraphrase depends primarily on the meaning of certain concrete objects, these richly suggestive objects may be the symbols.

THINKING ABOUT SYMBOLS

A symbol, to use poet John Drury’s concise definition, is “an image that radiates meanings.” While images in a poem can and should be read as what they literally are, images often do double duty, suggesting deeper meanings. Exactly what those meanings are, however, often differs from poem to poem.

Some symbols have been used so often and effectively over time that a traditional reading of them has developed. At times a poet clearly adopts an image’s traditional symbolic meaning. Some poems, however, deliberately play against a symbol’s conventional associations.

· ■ To determine the meaning (or meanings) of a symbol, start by asking if it has traditional associations. If so, consider whether the symbol is being used in the expected way or if the poet is playing with those associations.

· ■ Consider the symbol’s relationship to the rest of the poem. Let context be your guide. The image might have a unique meaning to the poem’s speaker.

· ■ Consider the emotions that the image evokes. If the image recurs in the poem, pay attention to how it changes from one appearance to the next.

· ■ Keep in mind that not everything is a symbol. If an image doesn’t appear to radiate meanings above and beyond its literal sense, don’t feel you have failed as a critic. As Sigmund Freud once said about symbol-hunting, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Chapter 13

LIMITS OF PARAPHRASE

A paraphrase never tells all that a poem contains, nor will every reader agree that a particular paraphrase is accurate. We all make our own interpretations, and sometimes the total meaning of a poem evades even the poet who wrote it. Asked to explain a passage in one of his poems, Robert Browning replied that when he had written the poem, only God and he knew what it meant; but “Now, only God knows.” Still, to analyze a poem as if we could be certain of its meaning is, in general, more fruitful than to proceed as if no certainty could ever be had. A useful question might be, “What can we understand from the poem’s very words?”

All of us bring personal associations to the poems we read. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” might give you special pleasure if you have ever vacationed on a small island or on the shore of a lake. Such associations are inevitable, even to be welcomed, as long as they don’t interfere with our reading the words on the page. We need to distinguish irrelevant responses from those the poem calls for. The reader who can’t stand “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” because she is afraid of bees isn’t reading a poem by Yeats, but one of her own invention.

Now and again we meet a poem—perhaps startling and memorable—into which the method of paraphrase won’t take us far. Some portion of any deep poem resists explanation, but certain poems resist it almost entirely. Many poems by religious mystics seem closer to dream than waking. So do poems that purport to record drug experiences, such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” So do nonsense poems, translations of primitive folk songs, and surreal poems. Such poetry may move us and give pleasure (although not, perhaps, the pleasure of intellectual understanding). We do it no harm by trying to paraphrase it, though we may fail. Whether logically clear or strangely opaque, good poems appeal to the intelligence and do not shrink from it.

So far, we have taken for granted that poetry differs from prose; yet all our strategies for reading poetry—plowing straight on through and then going back, isolating difficulties, trying to paraphrase, reading aloud, using a dictionary—are no different from those we might employ in unraveling a complicated piece of prose. Poetry, after all, is similar to prose in most respects. At the very least, it is written in the same language. Like prose, poetry shares knowledge with us. It tells us, for instance, of a beautiful island in Lake Gill, County Sligo, Ireland, and of how one man feels toward it.

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LYRIC POETRY

Originally, as its Greek name suggests, a lyric was a poem sung to the music of a lyre. This earlier meaning—a poem made for singing—is still current today, when we use lyrics to mean the words of a popular song. But the kind of printed poem we now call a lyric is usually something else, for over the past five hundred years the nature of lyric poetry has changed greatly. Ever since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, poets have written less often for singers, more often for readers. In general, this tendency has made lyric poems contain less word-music and (since they can be pondered on a page) more thought—and perhaps more complicated feelings.

NARRATIVE POETRY

Although a lyric sometimes relates an incident, or like “Those Winter Sundays” draws a scene, it does not usually relate a series of events. That happens in a narrative poem, one whose main purpose is to tell a story.

Narrative poetry dates back to the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (composed before 2000 B.C.) and Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey(composed before 700 B.C.). It may well have originated much earlier. In England and Scotland, storytelling poems have long been popular; in the late Middle Ages, ballads—or storytelling songs—circulated widely. Some, such as “Sir Patrick Spence” and “Bonny Barbara Allan,” survive in our day, and folksingers sometimes perform them.

Evidently the art of narrative poetry invites the skills of a writer of fiction: the ability to draw characters and settings, to engage attention, to shape a plot. Needless to say, it calls for all the skills of a poet as well. In the English language today, lyrics seem more plentiful than other kinds of poetry. Although there has recently been a revival of interest in writing narrative poems, they have a far smaller audience than the readership enjoyed by long verse narratives, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s  Evangeline  and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s  Idylls of the King , in the nineteenth century.

Here are two narrative poems: one medieval, one modern. How would you paraphrase the stories they tell? How do they hold your attention on their stories?

DRAMATIC POETRY

A third kind of poetry is dramatic poetry, which presents the voice of an imaginary character (or characters) speaking directly, without any additional narration by the author.

A dramatic poem, according to T. S. Eliot, does not consist of “what the poet would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.” Strictly speaking, the term dramatic poetry describes any verse written for the stage (and until a few centuries ago most playwrights, like Shakespeare and Molière, wrote their plays mainly in verse).

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

The term dramatic poetry most often refers to the dramatic monologue, a poem written as a speech made by a character (other than the author) at some decisive moment. A dramatic monologue is usually addressed by the speaker to some other character who remains silent. If the listener replies, the poem becomes a dialogue (such as Thomas Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid”) in which the story unfolds in the conversation between two speakers.

Chapter 22

THE SONNET

When we speak of “traditional verse forms,” we usually mean fixed forms. If written in a fixed form, a poem inherits from other poems certain familiar elements of structure: an unvarying number of lines, say, or a stanza pattern. In addition, it may display certain conventions: expected features such as themes, subjects, attitudes, or figures of speech. In medieval folk ballads a “milk-white steed” is a conventional figure of speech; and if its rider be a cruel and beautiful witch who kidnaps mortals, she is a conventional character.

In the poetry of western Europe and America, the sonnet is the fixed form that has attracted for the longest time the largest number of noteworthy practitioners. Originally an Italian form (sonetto: “little song”), the sonnet owes much of its prestige to Petrarch (1304–1374), who wrote in it of his love for the unattainable Laura. So great was the vogue for sonnets in England at the end of the sixteenth century that a gentleman might have been thought a boor if he couldn’t turn out a decent one. Not content to adopt merely the sonnet’s fourteen-line pattern, English poets also tried on its conventional mask of the tormented lover. They borrowed some of Petrarch’s similes (a lover’s heart, for instance, is like a storm-tossed boat) and invented others.