>Well, friends of mine dislike metaphors which disrupt the perceived
> unity of the poem. e.g.
> * when a difficult metaphor is alone in the middle of simple poem
> (though in other situations the metaphor may indeed be "a rich
> source of satisfaction to the hearer, and pride to the speaker.")
> * when a poet uses a metaphor to make the reader "see afresh" in
> a poem where the reader hasn't been encouraged to "see".
>
Strange that Tim Love sounds almost exactly like Aristotle!
On "old fashioned" British poetry, I wonder if that includes
Shakespeare's use of metaphor, which has always struck me as completely
organic. If he brings another image into play, it emerges as an aspect
of his central concern - millions of examples, but "and thus the native
hue of resolution / is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" will
do as a quick one - an illustration of Hamlet's dilemma, a striking
description of the dilemma of consciousness itself in relation to action,
and also a self portrait in miniature. I know it's an oft-cited quality,
but the truth is that his language, though highly complex and vivid, is
hardly ever ornamental. Maybe that's a result of the demands of a
dramatist on the language, that it has to be active - to be just
descriptive, which is perhaps what the Martian poets do, is a waste of
time on stage and is immediately felt as a slackening of energy in a play.
>Anyway, as Doug pointed, all of them talk about technique (sometimes about
>fashion), but almost never about poetic impulsion which is a matter of poets
>and not of grammarians. But poets use to be remiss about talking of their
>poetic impulsion. If they do so, they speak in a metaphorical way -that is,
>vaguely.
Doug raised of the question of untangling the literal and metaphoric
meanings. If language is all metaphor, as Nietzsche said, then it seems
impossible. (I wonder how language cannot be a metaphor, since a word is
not the thing it supposedly describes or symbolises - perhaps someone
will illuminate my simplemindedness). I do think that any metaphor that
works has some kind of physical literalness, however abstract it appears.
Metaphors surely work in similar ways as language itself, on a series of
complex improvisations that respond to context, roughly, like rules of
thumb. But a poem is, in itself, a metaphor, that perhaps stands
obliquely in relation to language as language stands in relation to
reality. (Obviously, I'm assuming that language is not reality). It's
often claimed for poetry that it returns to reality, and maybe if it
does, it appears so because it appeals strongly to an aesthetic (ie
sensual) responses, whether or not it appears to reflect what is called,
for better or worse, "objective reality". Neruda's metaphors work for me
because they seem to grow organically, budding off associatively from
strong emotional/physical responses. There's been some discussion of
metaphors that don't "work": again perhaps it's because they don't appear
organically embedded in the experience. A merely visual comparison
(blackberries and cobblestones) seems unsatisfactory, because it tells
nothing more than it purports to tell, that blackberries are like
cobblestones. Personally I have a great dislike for what I call
observational poems, where the poet looks around poetically and observes
something of interest which he (it is almost always he) then describes
for us: they almost always work on the principle that it sufficient to
say something is like something else to create an original insight.
Which seems rather to miss the point.
The precision of metaphors, if they are precise, lies in this area of
feeling (I mean this literally (!)) - a metaphor may look impossibly
vague if evaluated in other ways, but make complete crystalline "sense"
if it is asked to reveal its meaning in this direction. But surely an
important component of any metaphor is its capacity for
self-contradiction, its ability to be true and not true at the same time,
and the space that leaves for subjective, conscious realities to enter
the language?
Best
Alison
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
MASTHEAD online: http://www.geocities.com/soho/studios/5662
Home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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