Metaphor is central to literature. This is particularly true in poetry, where the poet attempts to create from words an emotional/intellectual image for something larger. That "larger" thing is essentially about the meaning of some aspect of life as the poet sees it and wishes to share with others. Poet August Turner is also a playwright - and he says that, when writing a play, "[t]he mental process is poetic: you use metaphor and condense" (1389). The central metaphor in Wilson's 1988 play Joe Turner's Come and Gone is song. Every character either has his or her "song" - or is searching for it. The purpose of this paper will be to examine those characters and their songs - the lost, the searched for, and the found - and to see how this metaphor serves the purpose of Wilson's overall theme in Joe Turner's Come and Gone.
The plot of the play has episodic slices-of-life turning upon variations on male-female searches for partners. Seth and Bertha Holly own a Pittsburgh boarding house, where full-time and temporary tenants reside. A stranger, Herald Loomis, comes bringing a daughter - they are looking for his wife, Martha, who left several years earlier. Seth and Bertha know who this woman is, but Seth doesn't trust Loomis, so the meeting is delayed while tensions mount. Seth finally makes Loomis leave - but not before a final-scene meeting between Loomis and Martha leads to a bloody (but not mortal) "reconciliation" of sorts. In a related subplot, a woman abandoned by her husband, Mattie, comes to stay at the boardinghouse - seduced by a young worker-musician, Jeremy. Jeremy abandons Mattie in favor of a prettier, less responsible young woman - but, at play's end, the hurt Mattie goes off to offer solace to the even-more-wounded Loomis, who has put his daughter in Martha's care and has left the boardinghouse. Additional subplots follow Seth's half-frustrated/half-successful efforts to establish a private business enterp...