Metaphor: Its Power and Uses
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It is a commonplace of elementary-school studies that a metaphor is "a figure of speech, an implied analogy in which one thing is imaginatively compared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing" (Morner and Rausch 131). But as Morner and Rausch explain, metaphors are not necessarily isolated to specific comparisons. Rather, a metaphor may be extended, or "sustained throughout the work and function[] as a controlling image" (132). MacArthur refines the definition even further, noting that metaphor, as a figure of speech, is specifically not literal (653). Metaphorical intent and form lend power to poetic diction, and such diction can be found not only in verse but also in drama and prose. Obviously, metaphor is embedded in mimesis, or imitation, since art that imitates life or behavior cannot, however precise it may be, be the literal thing. Poetic diction may, however, make the literal thing--whether thought, feeling, or image--meaningful and understandable in a way that a literal articulation cannot. For example:Literal: He was rich, but he was not happy. Now he is dead. however fortunate, before he dies (Eur. 27). The first and second statements are comparable, but the second has a force of irony that goes beyond the assertion of sadness in the first. To assert that a particular dead rich man was not happy has rather less power than to suggest that happiness eludes all men who have ever lived and t
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encountered during the journey are organized around a meditation of and acquiescence in the inevitability of death. Death is personified as a considerate and gracious friend whose "civility" overtakes and absorbs the vicissitudes--both labor and leisure--of the whole of life experience.
Dickinson's text illustrates how what MacArthur describes as master metaphor (654) stretches and worries multiple latent meanings out of seemingly simple comparisons. However, some criticism is concerned to identify failures of metaphor. For example, the "vigour" of even the most potent metaphors may fade or die, reaching the status of triteness or cliché (MacArthur 655): He struck out; that's a half-baked idea; as slow as molasses in January. Among the practitioners and critics of poetry, that possibility may lead to analysis of what are perceived as the failures of poetry or to a manifesto of the future of very poetry worthy of the name.
For the Romantics, one manifesto was Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The Romantics' essence of poetic diction was meant to be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (304), although those feelings were to be informed and inflected by competent craft, or the discipline of "emotion recollected i
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Approximate Word count = 1909
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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