The marvel of metaphor in the creation of meaning
July 3rd 2008 08:03
It was metaphor’s fault. It changed my mind about everything. It made me want to be a wordsmith. To do that with language. Illuminate it from the inside, make it pulse.
It was truly love at first sight:
‘Words and words and words, how they gallop –
how they lash their long manes and tails….’
Virginia Woolf
The etymology of the world ‘metaphor’ is Greek, meaning ‘to transfer. In modern Green the word metaphor is literally a cart or a trolley. Metaphors work in language by linking disparate ideas and by evoking a symbolic field of meaning.
Metaphors are so much a part of our language, we often don’t even know we are using them. A ‘stabbing pain,’ is metaphor (pain is being likened to a knife), a galloping fever (the speediness of a rise in temperature being likened to a horse), a broken heart (the heart being compared to a glass container or beautiful ornament).
Metaphor infuses our words with a rich semantic flavour some consider excessive and indulgent. Thomas Hobbes, for example claimed that metaphor obfuscates meaning and distorts thinking. But only a mean, nasty little person bereft of poetic sensibility could really feel this way about one of languages’ greatest gifts. Metaphor enlarges the field of meaning from which language draws, attracting a constellation of associated ideas.
Metaphor (unlike its well-behaved sister, simile) suffers from the absence of explicit comparison, by eliding over the aspects of the two ideas being compared.
So, for example, if I say, ‘love is as beautiful as a rose,’ it is clear that it is the joyous aspect of passion that is being compared to the beauty of a rose. If I said, ‘love is painful as a rose,’ that too would contain the range within which the meaning of the metaphor operates, denoting the thorns and the heartache. However, (and this why it is favored by poets), metaphor invites mystery and ambiguity. It unmoors us from the constraints of straight-laced simile. It breaks open the vaults of meaning, and allows for a far more inter-subjective exchange between language and its meaning-makers. One author, Doriaan Haarhof says ‘[metaphor] opens from horizon to horizon,’(‘The Writer’s Voice,’ Zebra Press, 1998 at 89).
I love the generosity of metaphor that suggests a symbolic field of meaning without ever defining it or closing it. So, for instance, during a period in my life when I suffered from crippling migraine headaches, I wrote a poem called ‘The Rapist,’ which contained my terror and sense of persecution in never knowing when the headaches would strike. Metaphor gave me a language that felt adequate.
Metaphor creates rickety bridges between different worlds, inviting a crossing-over, an experience of making one thing like another, offering opportunities for unlikely resemblances.
the skateboard of my heart
the regatta of her moods
spelunking in my obsession
the jagged glass of his caress
the shoehorn of my mother’s affection
the battalion of his excuses
Metaphor is expansive and endless. If there is a language of the soul, it is the poetry of metaphor. And of this, Rumi writes,
‘Listen to the presences inside poems
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints
and never leave the premises.’
(The Tent)
www.joannefedler.com
It was truly love at first sight:
‘Words and words and words, how they gallop –
how they lash their long manes and tails….’
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
The etymology of the world ‘metaphor’ is Greek, meaning ‘to transfer. In modern Green the word metaphor is literally a cart or a trolley. Metaphors work in language by linking disparate ideas and by evoking a symbolic field of meaning.
Metaphors are so much a part of our language, we often don’t even know we are using them. A ‘stabbing pain,’ is metaphor (pain is being likened to a knife), a galloping fever (the speediness of a rise in temperature being likened to a horse), a broken heart (the heart being compared to a glass container or beautiful ornament).
Metaphor infuses our words with a rich semantic flavour some consider excessive and indulgent. Thomas Hobbes, for example claimed that metaphor obfuscates meaning and distorts thinking. But only a mean, nasty little person bereft of poetic sensibility could really feel this way about one of languages’ greatest gifts. Metaphor enlarges the field of meaning from which language draws, attracting a constellation of associated ideas.
Metaphor (unlike its well-behaved sister, simile) suffers from the absence of explicit comparison, by eliding over the aspects of the two ideas being compared.
So, for example, if I say, ‘love is as beautiful as a rose,’ it is clear that it is the joyous aspect of passion that is being compared to the beauty of a rose. If I said, ‘love is painful as a rose,’ that too would contain the range within which the meaning of the metaphor operates, denoting the thorns and the heartache. However, (and this why it is favored by poets), metaphor invites mystery and ambiguity. It unmoors us from the constraints of straight-laced simile. It breaks open the vaults of meaning, and allows for a far more inter-subjective exchange between language and its meaning-makers. One author, Doriaan Haarhof says ‘[metaphor] opens from horizon to horizon,’(‘The Writer’s Voice,’ Zebra Press, 1998 at 89).
I love the generosity of metaphor that suggests a symbolic field of meaning without ever defining it or closing it. So, for instance, during a period in my life when I suffered from crippling migraine headaches, I wrote a poem called ‘The Rapist,’ which contained my terror and sense of persecution in never knowing when the headaches would strike. Metaphor gave me a language that felt adequate.
Metaphor creates rickety bridges between different worlds, inviting a crossing-over, an experience of making one thing like another, offering opportunities for unlikely resemblances.
the skateboard of my heart
the regatta of her moods
spelunking in my obsession
the jagged glass of his caress
the shoehorn of my mother’s affection
the battalion of his excuses
Metaphor is expansive and endless. If there is a language of the soul, it is the poetry of metaphor. And of this, Rumi writes,
‘Listen to the presences inside poems
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints
and never leave the premises.’
(The Tent)
Rumi
www.joannefedler.com
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Comment by Jayne Kearney
Writers In Writing (and other writing)
Another eloquent post about the craft (and art) of writing. I have recently completed your latest (beautiful) novel Things Without A Name and was struck by the evocative nature and originality of your metaphors throughout.
I have just grabbed my copy and flicked to the first I could find. If my life wasn't so snowed under right now - there's a metaphor for you (and a cliche) - I would have more time to search further. But I do love this one:
"On our way back, as we pass the alleyway alive with scuttling McDonald's wrappers and Dunkin' Donut boxes, my eyes are sucked to This City Scares Me More and More graffitied on the wall."
The use here of the metaphorical niche of personification is very effective - the alleyway being 'alive'. I also love the idea of the narrator's eyes being 'sucked' to the graffiti.
These are just the first I touched and I know the book is littered (can't help the metaphor!) with so many more. I wish I had turned down the page of every one I love - but then my book would be even more 'dog-eared' than it already is!
Great post
Jayne
Comment by Joanne Fedler
Hope you are enjoying school holidays. I have Kung Fu Panda to look forward to tomorrow... be still my beating heart...
Jo