[New-Poetry] Metaphorica

[David Graham]

Frost's "Education By Metaphor" is also interesting along these lines.

When I teach metaphor one thing I often find myself talking about is  
the difference between what might be called cultural or natural  
metaphors, which often lie buried below the surface, and ones that  
are more a matter of surface glitter & individual invention.  Natural  
metaphors would include things like winter as the season of old age,  
flowers as symbols of transient beauty, etc.  A cultural metaphor  
might be the "road of life" notion that underlies a poem like Frost's  
"The Road Not Taken."  Frost is conventionally associating time with  
space, and envisioning experiencing time as walking down a path.   
Students often don't realize it's a metaphor, in my experience, until  
you point it out.  (For example, I ask them how they *know* the  
poem's about big life decisions, which they all "get" right away, and  
not just a walk in the woods on Saturday.)  As I recall from an  
Anthropology class long ago, the future is "ahead" only in some  
cultures.

Cultural & natural metaphors, as I see it, don't go "dead,"  
typically, unless they're presented too baldly or simplistically.  If  
you simply write that "time is money," that's obviously stale; but if  
you work up some economic metaphors to describe time passing, that  
can be fine if you find fresh ways to put it.

The other sort of metaphor, which generally calls more attention to  
itself, goes dead rather quickly when overused; it becomes a pre-fab  
phrase or idea, like "bat out of hell," which when first coined was  
probably a stunner.  As was "the bottom line" when I first heard  
it. . . .


========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

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On Feb 14, 2008, at 9:25 AM, Michael Snider wrote:

>
> On Feb 14, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Halvard Johnson wrote:
>
>> Of course, Hall also said that, when reading poetry, he'd read only
>> as far as the first "dead metaphor"--which, as we know, is a dead
>> metaphor in itself.
>>>
>
> But did he say that in a poem?
>
> And more seriously, what about things like "follow a train of  
> thought"? There are at least two metaphors buried there-- George  
> Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, argue pretty  
> persuasively that human thought is impossible without metaphor, and  
> later, in Philosophy in the Fesh, that most of those metaphors are  
> dependent on (hang from) out literal (as if read) flesh.
>
> Is a fresh-killed metaphor OK until it begins to stink, and then  
> once more poetically useful when the odor of decay has gone?
>
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