Mapping Metaphor in
Poetry: Generating
New Understandings
Presented by Dixie K. Keyes
Arkansas State University
Is metaphor JUST figurative
language?
Consider the GENERATIVE power of
metaphor….it has constructive character
“waiting to be brought to birth.”
 Consider METAPHORICAL THOUGHT as
an umbrella to a number of figurative
language terms: simile, personification,
oxymoron, hyperbole, poetic analogy…
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There’s an implicit third term-understanding that is generated
THROUGH metaphorical thought
Comparison
The third part: New
Understandings
A description of how metaphors
account for growth….
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Metaphors cultivate the mind. They prepare
furrows for planting ideas, which in time grow to
mature understanding. If the climate is too arid
for learning or if work has been neglected for too
long, metaphors can break through an
unreceptive crust to more fertile ground where
the nutrients of teaching can be absorbed.
(Peele, 1984, p. 2)
Consider Mapping Metaphors for enhanced
understanding…
Father—
Central yet absent like a tuba
Missing from a symphony
battered by Himself
broken apart and beaten,
a tuba that angered its
Player—the shine lost,
the dents deep, the Mouthpiece
still intact, lying in a pawn shop,
lost to the highest Bidder.
Father—
no longer necessary,
your shine, memories of your elegance,
and the waves of notoriety in my heart
have rubbed callous melodies—
Empty Exhaltation.
Let’s map it….FATHER like a TUBA
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Target=Father
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Members-mind, heart,
body, effort
Purpose-role model,
encourager, provider of
unconditional love
Means-hugs, laughter,
time, presence, support
New Understandings?
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Source=Tuba
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Members-shine, dents,
mouthpiece, melody
Purpose-part of a
symphony, make music,
deep resonance, central
melody
Means-player/musician,
sheet music, practice
“A Rainy Morning” by Ted Kooser in his
book Delights & Shadows
A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.
Some canonical poetry….
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James Wright’s “The Jewel”:
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There is this cave
in the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A Cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.
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Cave = silence, a cloister
Bones = dark emeralds
What does “cloister” mean?
Etymology:
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Middle English cloistre, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin claustrum, from Latin, bar, bolt, from
claudere to close — more at close
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13th century
Date:
1 a: a monastic establishment b: an area within a monastery or convent to which the religious are
normally restricted c: monastic life d: a place or state of seclusion2: a covered passage on the
side of a court usually having one side walled and the other an open arcade or colonnade
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Epilogue
By Robert Lowell
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
Yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
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The Willows of Massachusetts
By Denise Levertov
Animal willows of November
In pelt of gold enduring when all else
Has let go all ornament
And stands naked in the cold.
Cold shine of sun on swamp water
Cold caress of slant beam on bough,
Gray light on brown bark.
Willows—last to relinquish a leaf,
Curious, patient, lion-headed, tense
With energy, watching
The serene cold through a curtain
of tarnished strands.
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Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
by Dylan Thomas
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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is
right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
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Emily Dickinson
Mapping can also lead to new
understandings of TYPES of metaphor…
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Extended metaphor
Epic or Homeric simile
Mixed metaphor
Dead metaphor
Synechdochic metaphor
Paralogical metaphor
Experiential metaphor
Complex metaphor
Loose or compound metaphor
Implicit metaphor (tenor is implied)
Submerged metaphor
Tight metaphor (grounded in only one point of resemblance)
Root metaphor
Conceptual metaphor
Dying metaphor
Let’s go beyond the lit
textbook definition of
metaphor….
feel the power!
dkeyes@astate.edu