[New-Poetry] Metaphorica

[JforJames at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/14/2008 10:49:23 AM Eastern Standard Time,  
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:

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. . .  .



-
I like the distinction you're making. Bob mentioned symbol. I would say  
archetype underlies most images that defy time...don't wear out. But as the  
ultra-talkers are wont to prove, you make some pretty stunning stuff out things  
that have 'expiry date' stamped on them somewhere. Another hundred years from  
now, if the poems survive, they'll need footnotes, but in the meantime they 
open  our eyes (ears, nose, all senses) to the world about us, which is  probably 
their raison d'être.
 
Here's a metaphoric image that has made it, thus far...
 
The poplars felled; farewell to the shade,
And whispering sounds of the cool colonnade.
 
>From Cowper's "The Poplar-Field." These lines were cited in the first  
chapter to Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth, a book that is largely about  
ecopoetics as it has become to be understood in the West, during Post-Industrial  
age. Unless all the colonnades fall to ruin, the comparison of line of  
poplars to a colonnade will last. So this metaphor straddles the cultural and  the 
natural. The natural part residing in the apt comparison. 
 
All I can remember from Hall's essay about "Dead Metaphors" was that he  
thought they shouldn't be used in poetry (presumably contemporary poetry, poetry  
being written concurrently with his essay). To criticize metaphors that have  
become dead would be obtuse. But as I suggested above, one should be able to  
tell which metaphors are likely to spit in the eye of time. The other thing I  
would conjecture is that one of the tasks of a poet is to  redeem words, 
phrases, that have been lost, that have slipped into  'non-poetic realms', whether 
lost to time (anachronistic), lost to commerce,  lost to advertising, lost to 
psychology, lost to  cliche/idiom, lost anywhere. That's what poets do: We 
don't give up on  words or phrases. 
 
Finnegan



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