Metaphor is often classed as a “poetic device” by those whose job it is to analyze poetry. But for those of us who create poetry, metaphor is not a “device”--that is (according to the Oxford American Dictionary), "a contrivance or decorative design." For poets, metaphor is a way of thinking, a habit of finding likenesses in things that are typically not thought of as being alike. The point of using a metaphor is to reveal these likenesses in order to convey an otherwise hidden truth.
The Lazy, the Ostentatious, and the (Unintentionally) Comic
Metaphor can go wrong for a variety of reasons. The most common is simple laziness: the poet relies on a cliché instead of finding a fresh likeness. "A blanket of snow," "lips like cherries," and "honey-colored hair" are just a few examples. At some point in the past these metaphors may have been fresh, but over time they've become so obvious that they feel merely decorative. And poetry should never be merely decorative.
Of course, the desire to avoid the obvious can lead to another problem for poets: the urge to be ostentatiously inventive—something even excellent writers can succumb to. Here's an example from usually excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet:
In the cold kitchen of heaven,
daylight spoons out its cream-of-wheat.
The poet's metaphors constitute an over-elaborate personification that invests the natural scene with a faux domesticity that feels terribly forced.
Or consider this line by young poet, from a poem whose speaker bemoans a romantic breakup:
My dreams collapse like The Flying Wallendas.
The Wallendas were a family of high wire artists, several of whom fell to their deaths in 1962 while performing without a net on a cable strung between two buildings in Detroit. Comparing such an event to the loss of one's romantic dreams is not only emotional exaggeration, but an example of sheer bad taste.
And then there's this excerpt from a love poem by the author of the article you're reading now, which mercifully went unpublished:
their hearts stammering
bless us as they cradle
each other
The personification of the hearts here can't help but give the lovers' hearts mouths and lips to stammer with—an image that's at best bizarre, at worst grotesque.
Juggling Multiple Realities
The key thing to remember when using metaphor is that it introduces multiple realities into your poem. Ted Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, is especially adept at keeping this fact not only in mind but in front of the reader. Consider, for example, his poem “Flying at Night”:
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
Notice how adroitly Kooser manages the likeness between the relatively near human lights below the plane and the distant stars above it, balancing the two realities from the first line on through the end. Of course, not every poem needs to extend its metaphors in this way. Robert Frost, in his haunting sonnet “Design,” lets the likenesses proliferate, but uses the color white to hold them all together. Even a poem famous for its metaphorical diversity like “Freedom of Love,” by André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, coheres because of its focus on the poet’s wife.
Ultimately, poems are like batteries: they store imaginative energy and release it in moments of illumination. Revealing significant likenesses through metaphor does more than can give your fundamental images a freshness and an emotional/intellectual force. It shines a light into the dark that surrounds us.
Joseph Hutchison - Joseph Hutchison has worked for many years as a professional writer, both inside corporations and—since 1992—as the co-owner ...
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