Diction and metaphor

Text 3

Express your own opinion of the content and expression-plane of the text.

Adduce examples excerpted from Russian and English poetry to demonstrate how different kinds of meter are used.

Discuss the text in class.

Present a summary of the text

THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE:

We may value the language of literature for the way it uses the phonological system of the language in creating sound patterns and rhythms. We may also value it for the way it chooses words from the vocabulary, that is, for its diction.

Jonathan Swift defined style as "proper words in proper places," a proper word being one whose total meaning is exactly right for its context. Meaning, as we saw in the preceding chapter, embraces a word's literal sense, its associations, its grammatical function, and its scope of use. It is with reference to all of these that literary language strives to find the word that is exactly right.

In all language it is important that a word's basic meaning—its literal sense and grammatical function—be appropriate, but in literature it is crucial that the word's nuances—its associations and scope of use—also be as appro­priate as they can. When a writer has a choice among a number of synonyms, or words with the same basic meaning, he must choose the one whose nuances best fit the needs of his work. W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called "The Second Coming," which ends in a vision of impending doom with the description of an ominous beast moving in the direction of Bethlehem:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

As he was writing the poem, Yeats considered the phrase "has set out for Bethlehem" but rejected it in favor of the expression "slouches toward Bethlehem."⁴ Yeats's revision was a good one; "has set out for" is appropriate in sense but lacks any except the most pedestrian associations. "Slouches" suggests a semihuman, stooping movement, the ungainly, loose-limbed stride of a giant animal. In addition to its related meanings, slouch contains the phonesthemes si- and -ouch, shared by words like slime, slither, slash, slave, slump and crouch, grouch, ouch, pouch, which reinforce its meaning by clang association. For Yeats's poem slouch is the proper word in the proper place. In literature a word's associations may be even more important than its literal sense, and the more associations it has—provided they are relevant to the work of literature—the better the word is. In expository language multiple meanings are a vice to be weeded out whenever possible, but in literature they are a virtue to be cultivated. Several meanings can be com­pacted in a single word not only as associations, but as literal senses as well.

A polysemous word, one that has several distinct senses, may be used in more than one of its meanings at the same time. For example, William Blake wrote a poem called "London" in which he described the corrosive effect the city can have upon men, beginning with these lines:

I wander through each chartered street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

If Blake had wanted to avoid repeating the word mark in the last line, he might have written "Signs of weakness, signs of woe" But if he had so written, his poem would have been the poorer. Mark has the advantage of having several senses that are appropriate to the context and that consequently reinforce one another. In the fourth line the dominant sense of the word is 'signs' or 'indications.' In addition, however, a mark can be a defilement, a scar, or a stain; when a thing is marked, it is defaced.

A mark is also a sign of ownership, like a brand. These secondary meanings fit the poem, for Blake is saying that the life of the city-dweller scars and brands him. If we ask what the word means here, whether 'indications,' 'scars,' or 'ownership signs,' the answer must be that it means all three things, and all three simulta­neously. The word has the kind of systematic ambiguity that Pound intended when he said great literature is language charged with meaning.

Occasionally writers go even farther afield in an effort to compress several meanings into one word, by having recourse to the pun. To pun is to use one word in a context where another word with a quite different meaning but similar pronunciation can also make sense. It is thus a systematic use of homonyms. In grosser forms it is a technique often found in jokes, like Have you heard about the monk who ripped his garments because he was a holy tearer? The device has also been used by poets in serious contexts, for example, the last stanza of John Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father":

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun

My last thread I shall perish on the shore;

Swear by Thyself that at my death Thy son

Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore;

And having done that Thou hast done,

I fear no more.

The italicized words are puns: the first on sun, a common word play in the seventeenth century when this poem was written; the second on the poet's own name, Donne; and the third on the maiden name of his wife, Ann More. The use of puns—which can be called paronomasia if a fancier term is wanted—though often thought to be a low form of humor, is common in some of our best authors, such as Shakespeare.

Another way of using the vocabulary to condense meaning is the metaphor, which is an expression that has been transferred from its normal, literal meaning to a different but analogous one. Metaphor is common in all varie­ties of language. It is found in everyday conversation: "He thought the car was a peach, but it turned out to be a lemon." It is found in literary prose, like William Jennings Bryan's 1896 speech against the gold standard: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." And of course it is found in poetry, like Tennyson's "the black bat, night, has flown," which equates the passing of night with a bat's flight, or Robert Herrick's advice "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time":

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying,

in which the rosebud is a metaphor for the transitory pleasure of first love.

The essence of the metaphor is that it finds a similarity between two things that are on first consideration quite different from each other. It points up an unfamiliar aspect of a familiar scene and thus provides a new way of looking at the world. The metaphors of literature must therefore be fresh and new, but the metaphors of daily speech are often stale and shopworn. The first man to use the term lemon for a person or thing that fails to perform as expected created a vivid metaphor based on a similarity between our reactions to the sourness of lemon juice and to an inferior performance. But, as the term became widely used, it turned into a cliché.

Nowadays there are doubtless many speakers who use the word with no consciousness of its metaphorical origin; for them the meaning 'inferior object' has become just one more sense of the word lemon. Thus, dead metaphors are reincarnated as living meanings.

A metaphor is a figure of speech, an intentional deviation from the normal use of words; there are a number of other figures, some of which are special kinds of metaphor. If two things are said to be similar rather than directly identified with each other, the figure is called a simile. Thus, The gold standard is a crown of thorns is a metaphor proper, but The gold standard is like a crown of thorns is a simile. The difference between the two figures, which is not of much practical consequence, is that in the simile there will always be present some expression— like, as, similar to, reminds us q/^that asserts an analogy is being made, while in the metaphor one thing is simply said to be another. In personification, a thing or abstraction is treated like a human being, as John Keats in his "Ode on Melancholy" speaks of

Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu.

In synecdoche, the name for a part is used for the whole or vice versa; an example is in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,

in which the claws are used as a synecdoche for the whole crab.

Metonymy is a figure in which a thing is named after something associated with it, for example palette is used for 'painting' and fiddle-bow for 'music' in the open­ing lines of W. B. Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" describing those who find art not relevant to political and social issues:

I have heard that hysterical women say

They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.

Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement, like Chaucer's description of two young men that dueled over a girl: "Up to the ankle fought they in hir [their] blood."

Litotes is an understatement that negates the opposite of what is intended, for example not brave for 'cowardly' or a line from the Old English poem Beowulf, "The prince would not let his murderous guest escape alive," which is to say he killed him.

Paradox is a statement that seems absurd because it is self-contradictory but is nevertheless sensible, for example Milton's description of the climate in hell: "the parching air / Burns frore [frozen], and cold performs th' effect of fire."

A paradoxical phrase like bittersweet or loud silence is called an oxymoron, literally 'a keen foolishness.'

Irony is a statement whose literal sense is the opposite of what is intended; thus, Jonathan Swift in "A Modest Proposal" suggested that the best way to control the size of the Irish population would be to sell the children of the poor to the landlords as meat, thereby suggesting that absentee landlords were already devouring the population.

A mixed metaphor is a combination of incompatible figures of speech, like The doctor, while believing her to be at death's door, felt he could pull her through or Hamlet's "to take arms against a sea of troubles," where an unmixed metaphor might have taken arms against a band of troubles or perhaps built a dike against a sea.

In addition to metaphor and its variants, literary language uses other forms of expression, such as imagery, conceits, symbolism, and allegory. An image is a picture drawn with words, often designed to give a concrete expression to abstract ideas, for example Shelley's poem "Ozymandias":

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The poem is simply the vivid description of a ruined statue in the desert, but the image serves as a comment on the vanity of human pride in a more memorable way than could a straightforward statement.

A conceit is a far­fetched or long, drawn-out analogy, such as John Donne's "The Flea," in which he speaks of a flea that has bitten both him and a woman he wants to seduce and likens the mingling of their blood in the insect to their sexual union.

The term symbol is used in several different ways, but in literary use it most often means a thing that stands for or calls to mind some other thing because of an analogical resemblance between them, as a star is a symbol of hope or water one of life. In this use of the term, a symbol is a thing, whereas a metaphor is a word or phrase.

An allegory is an extended symbolic story, like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which a journey is taken as a symbol of life and the central character, named Christian, has adventures with a number of other symbolic characters like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, in places like Doubting Castle. Although symbolism abounds in modern litera­ture, allegory is not much in favor. It was, however, very common in earlier times.

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