The metaphorical habit:

‘We shall not cease from exploration’

One of the many valuable things I learnt from MI Kuruvilla was that there are two great modes of artistic expression, namely the metaphorical and the ironical. Let us here consider the first. As we know, a metaphor is a figure of speech by which something is described as if it were a quite different thing. This enables the qualities of the latter to be imaginatively attributed to the former, thereby heightening our understanding of it in a way that would not have been possible with a literal description. The impact made is usually emotional as well as logical. A familiar example would be Yeats’ line, “In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

As I now realise, Kuruvilla was not referring to metaphor as a mere literary device but as an actual literary attitude or approach. By means of it the poet’s capacity for experience is enriched by his ability to perceive and communicate its relation to seemingly different realms of experience. This facility for harmonizing experiences is very much a part of the creative imagination, which we remember Coleridge to have described as “the power (that) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities; of sameness, with difference; etc.”

Evidently basing himself on this definition, Eliot explains how “when a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience: the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.... (but)....in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.” How does this work in his practice of poetry? Let’s examine Shakespeare’s sonnet 73in the first instance:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed, whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

The three consecutive quatrains which comprise the first dozen lines develop three different but connected metaphors through which the poet explores his ever-deepening sense of desolation. In the first, it is seen to be equivalent to the time of year when winter is nigh and the few remaining yellowed leaves are ready to drop off their trembling boughs. Note how this harsh glimpse of natural decay provides a sharper insight into how the poet feels about himself than any literal description could have done.

This is further elaborated by the metaphor of the threadbare, birdless boughs itself being developed into one of deserted choir-stalls which once resounded with the tuneful voices of choristers.

This conveys the added pathos of the poet’s sense of the loss of his creative powers.

The urgency grows greater in the second quatrain as the poet now sees his condition to correspond to the even more fleeting twilight of a single day, when the sun has already set and the thick darkness of night menaces with its premonition of extinction – “death’s second self” which puts an end to daytime activity by enforcing an unwelcome rest. With the third quatrain there comes an unexpected switch to yet another metaphoric dimension, that of fire, with its further grave implications for the apprehensive poet.

The fire is already dead, all that is visible is the glow of its embers soon to be extinguished by the ashes of the very fuel that had supported its blazing. Thus the sad irony that youth’s thoughtless expenditure of energy is what brings about the eventual decline into old age, making youth the future deathbed of life. It is the last twist of the knife that the poetic imagination, operating in metaphoric mode, imparts to the poet as he explores the extent of his sense of desolation.

This sonnet obviously abounds with the “exploratory creativeness and metaphorical concreteness” that Leavis has spoken of as being typical of Shakespeare’s style. But even here we can see that metaphor is not only a matter of poetic diction but of poetic thinking, the creative instinct for understanding and rendering one experience in terms of others. In fact, a poet can demonstrate this metaphorical habit of mind even without resorting to figuratively rich language, even when his style is essentially bare of metaphoric complexity, as in Frost’s ‘A Brook in the City’:

“The farm house lingers, though averse to square With the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook? I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength, And impulse, having dipped a finger length And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed A flower to try its currents where they crossed......How else dispose of an immortal force No longer needed? Staunch it at its source With cinder loads dumped down?

The brook was thrown Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone In fetid darkness still to live and run - And all for nothing it had ever done Except forget to go in fear perhaps. No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder If from its being kept forever under That thoughts may not have risen that so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep.”

There is little or nothing metaphorical about the style of this starkly powerful poem. But without our realising it, through the shock of the intimation of the brook’s fate, its conversion to the living death of an underground sewer, the entire poem becomes a metaphor of man’s accountability for the brutal suppression of nature whereby he satisfies his lust for expansion. As Frost himself puts it, “Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing. And there is a sense in which all poems are the same old metaphor always.” It is a theme that has become increasingly common in poetry since the Industrial Revolution. And it is one that is painfully familiar in our own experience, for instance, of how the once-cherished “welas” that used to “hold as in an elbow-crook” our rural suburbs have been buried under truckloads of garbage and red earth to facilitate urban expansion.

Metaphor may, therefore, be regarded as the great mode of imaginative exploration. We cannot do without it because, as it says at the end of ‘The Four Quartets’, “We shall not cease from exploration.” To further resort to Eliot’s apt phraseology we shall always expect, on account of the great poet’s zest for presenting the totality of his experience, to be “moved by fancies that are curled around these (his metaphorical) images and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

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