G. Thompson
Today--figures of speech. These are some of the tools in the poet's kit, some of which carry over into other literature as well--and into common use.
allegory, allusion, image, irony, metaphor, metonymy, overstatement (hyperbole), oxymoron, simile, symbol, synecdoche, understatement all find their way into discourse in all sorts of ways. Many of these are present as proverbs or as cliches, and we don't notice them.
When I talk with people from another country, they are puzzled about how many terms we use which are derived from baseball. I really struck out on that idea. If you don't know baseball, you think that means you did pretty well. That idea comes out of left field. It's a whole new ball game. I'm batting a thousand. She really threw me a curveball. They brought in the heavy hitters. They are playing hardball. I'm going to go to bat for your proposal. We're going to have to take a raincheck. I'll need to touch base with management.
These and other cliches are dead metaphors--we use them and others (when we do) out of habit. But we look to poets and to literary artists to make metaphors alive again, to serve as observers saying to us Look--look at that, look at your words, notice the world.
Looking, listening, feeling, smelling, tasting--any evocation of one of the senses is called an image. This was crucial before photography, when people had fewer pictorial images as part of their world. One of the common patterns in poetry is called ekphrasis or ut pictura poesis, two foreign phrases for rendering a scene in words, particularly a painting. We saw that with Williams' poem "The Dance."
Description is a key activity in literature, as it fulfills the need to tell you what the persona or narrator is seeing, but selectively, rendering just a few details which are significant. (In a photograph there may be too many details, and as viewers we have to sort through those which are significant, through a normal hierarchy of center / periphery or left-right, top-down.) Description is a key part of "Dulce et Decorum Est" (878).
In the early 20th-c. as part of the move away from traditional verse, some mostly American poets began to create poems which were nothing but images. Early Ezra Pound has a poem consisting, haiku-like, of a title plus two lines:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The juxtaposition hits you as a kind of metaphor, linking the urban and mechanistic with the pastoral and natural. The poet is erased here--no commentary is made to tell us how he feels. He's a camera-eye, a flaneur observing the "apparition" of city life, the faces emerging from the indistinct grey crowd. Because we are not told, we project onto the visual moment.
I would call the bringing together of the urban and pastoral here, in the manner of Pound's poem, a metaphor.
faces in the crowd // petals on a bough
Something imagined as something else--traditionally these are tenor and vehicle. The tenor is the recipient of the metaphorical qualities, and the vehicle is how these are assigned. So in this instance, the tenor would be the people on the Paris Metro, the vehicle the cherry-tree petals. Alternatively you can use ground and figure.
Metaphor is a way of freshening observation, of giving new life to the overly familiar. Shakespeare does this in the sonnet you scanned last week, in which the familiar process of aging and proceeding toward death is figured as the passing of the seasons, as the passing of the day, as the dying-down of a fire. In the process we have other metaphors: trees with (absent) birds are figured as choirs in a chapel, death is figured as the onset of night, the hearth with ashes as a deathbed. (or vice versa?)
Linda Pastan's poem "Marks" uses the metaphor of grading as a measure of the speaker's performance in her family (much to her dissatisfaction).
We can think of personification as a subset of metaphor, in which an inanimate object receives projected human qualities. The buzzsaw in Frost's poem "'Out, Out--'" is a recent example for us. We can link personification to apostrophe--the distinction is that in apostrophe, the speaker is addressing the inanimate object as though it could hear:
"Thou still unravished bride of quietness," Keats says in opening "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Throughout the poem he talks to the (imagined) funeral urn as though responsible for the figures painted on it and as a representative figure for the Platonic permanence of art.
Simile is basically metaphor, but using like or as--the distinction is that the speaker is calling more attention to the comparison.
"O, my luve's like a red, red rose"--she is? How so? Does she have petals? Does she smell good? Do bees hang around her?
Women and roses (or flowers) are conventional enough that if you don't want to descend into cliche, as Burns does here, you have to do something different.
Allusion, as we've said before, is a reference to something outside the text. Commonly it's another literary work or a cultural touchstone such as the Bible. The poem by Todd Boss here makes an allusion to the crash of the German airship the Hindenburg. The sticky part of allusions is that if the audience doesn't recognize the reference, it loses its point.
Analogy is an extended comparison, which matches up more or less on several points. Lockwood's poem plays with the idea of zoo as a location where animals are confined and put on exhibit, and then riffs on other sorts of containers.
"The word 'zoo' is a zoo for the zoo."
Meaning that words function in a way as containers for ideas.
(Look the poem over, 842-43)
Mays' comment: "All figurative language involves an attempt to clarify something and to prompt readers to feel a certain way about it." (844)
Symbol (848)--"something that stands for something else." We are surrounded by symbols, in the sense of corporate icons. Nike swoosh, Amazon smile, Apple apple, McDonald's golden arches, etc. These are one-to-one symbols (though what we think of the corporations may not be simple). One-to-one symbols may line up in a pattern, and when that happens, we are usually looking at an allegory. A 17th-c. Puritanical author, John Bunyan, wrote an allegory called Pilgrim's Progress, in which a character named Christian meets Evangelist, and they have to pass through the city of Vanity Fair, ignore the advice of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and go through the Valley of Humiliation to get to the Celestial City. Allegories are not favored by literary artists, because the interpretation is so obvious as to be insulting.
Most uses of symbols are more complex than cross = Christianity or swastika = Nazis. (Unfortunately, the Nazis ruined the swastika, which before the 1930s was an emblem of good luck--if you travel to India you will still see swastikas on vehicles and in other places, but not rotated as the Nazi symbol was). Literature tends to involve more complexity and leave more room for readers to make meaning.
Look at "The Sick Rose," 853--it doesn't seem that Blake can be talking about a literal rose. And it doesn't quite work to treat the rose as a woman, as in Burns' poem
Adrienne Rich's poem is pretty close to an allegory, I think. Look at "Diving into the Wreck," 838. Did they write about this one? Observations?
Other terms:
Metonymy--the name of one thing used to refer to another associated thing. Example--the White House has decided to veto the bill. Here the White House substitutes for the President (or more likely, his spokesperson). While it may seem to resemble metaphor in linking two things, it's different in that metaphor involves substitution, metonymy linkage.
Synecdoche is a subcategory of metonymy in which the part of something stands for the whole. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
Oxymoron is a phrase which is apparently contradictory, but actually paradoxical. When we read Hamlet, the king, Claudius, tries out a few oxymorons to describe the juxtaposition in time between his brother the former king's death and his marriage to his widow, Gertrude. So they have at once to mourn King Hamlet's death and celebrate their marriage.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
with an auspicious and a dropping eye,
with mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife. (1.2.8-14)
Claudius' sorrow is tempered somewhat by the fact that he poisoned his brother in order to marry Gertrude and take the throne, but that hasn't been revealed yet in the play.
Other oxymorons: Hamlet tells his mother later that "I must be cruel to be kind." Act naturally; that's my only choice; it's an open secret. Some are clever observations: jumbo shrimp. Military music. Business ethics.
Sherry Turkle's book title Alone Together.
Irony deserves more space. I mentioned a couple of classes ago that we may classify irony:
Dramatic irony. A character says something, the full significance of which he / she doesn't realize, but the audience or reader does. When Oedipus declares that he is going to find the murderer of King Laius, he doesn't know, nor does anyone else in the play yet, but the audience does, that he is the murderer. Sometimes this sort of irony can be sardonic, as when OJ declares that he is going to find the real killer.
Situational irony. Characters may realize partially or fully the difference between how things were supposed to be and how they are. The men in Owen's poem exhibit this, between the patriotic sentiments used to characterize the war back home and the awful reality of trench warfare.
Cosmic irony--things do not turn out, as though the universe is playing a huge joke on us.
I don't think rain on your wedding day qualifies.
Work through Owen's poem.