AlienFlower Blog

Metaphors

2008-09-18T08:13:00.001-07:00

Subject: Metaphors
To: aliflo, alienflower.org

Hello,

I require some help regarding the definitions of descriptive, organic and structural metaphors. What definitions I have found are very vague and do not give me enough data with which to differentiate between the different definitions.

Any help that you could give me would be most welcome.

Thanks,

Chris Hamilton

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Dear Chris,

Thank you for sending your question. My first thought is for us to search for poetry dictionaries that clearly define these terms. In my search this morning on the internet, I have not found anything yet. I will keep searching for dictionary definitions and share any new information.

Let's start with organic metaphor (vs dead metaphor?). I found Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.'s web page on Organic Metaphor:

http://www.ajdrake.com/e491_fall_04/materials/guides/gd_rom_organic_metaphor.htm

He begins his text by quoting The Portable Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge):

"Coleridge says that "the spirit of poetry" must "circumscribe itself by rules"; it must "embody [itself] in order to reveal itself.""

Does organic metaphor "embody" the poem?

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Tim Love's article (link shared below) asks,
(in reference to descriptive metaphor?):

"Are they metaphors of animals, or nature, or politics?? Maybe the image that is used is of importance in the reader's understanding of the stories."

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Structural metaphor is defined on the Summer Institute of Linguistics web site:

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAStructuralMetaphor.htm

"A structural metaphor is a conventional metaphor in which one concept is understood and expressed in terms of another structured, sharply defined concept."

Example: "I demolished his argument."

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I am curious to know what definitions you have you found so far, even though they are vague. Will you share them with us please? And also what definitions might any other AlienFlower reader have to share with us?

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Metaphor in poetry enlivens, paints a better visual image with words, adds depth and breathes life, and brings beauty and understanding that might otherwise be lost to the reader. I found a metaphor essay written by British Teacher Tim Love on Tim's Web site:

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/workshops/metaphor.html

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The University of Oregon is home to the Metaphor Center:

http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm

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And I found a web site article that discusses "Making Sense of Metaphor" as it relates to the American legal discourse and system. There is discussion of cultural uses of language and metaphor. Here is one of the reviews quotes of the article:

"In 'Making Sense of Metaphors', Professor Bernard Hibbitts mines the richest possible vein of understanding, one that leads directly to the heart of the transformations affecting not just contemporary legal discourse but also the nature and structure of our entire legal system. Words and language are not a mere assemblage of clichés or conceptual archetypes: they serve as an organ of collective perception. And metaphor is the matrix of all verbal activity. The media of the last century and a half have rendered written codes obsolete: the electronic word is oral and kinesthetic and invested with a paradoxical permanence far more stable than that which writing can confer. In this provocative analysis of the medium, Professor Hibbitts uncovers the patterns of change that inform present events and will continue to do so for generations to come."

Eric McLuhan
Co-author (with Marshall McLuhan), The Laws of Media; co-editor (with Frank Zingrone), The Essential McLuhan

"A truly astonishing article...surely one of the most significant of contributions to the relative role of the senses in social life."

John Urry
Professor of Sociology
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Author, The Tourist Gaze
http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_int.htm

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Here is the general definition of metaphor for those who like dictionary definitions:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=metaphor

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metaphor

n.

1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world's a stage” (Shakespeare).
2. One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol: “Hollywood has always been an irresistible, prefabricated metaphor for the crass, the materialistic, the shallow, and the craven” (Neal Gabler).

[Middle English methaphor, from Old French metaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Greek, transference, metaphor, from metapherein, to transfer : meta-, meta- + pherein, to carry; see bher-1 in Indo-European Roots.]

n : a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity

Response Poems

2005-08-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

Weathervane Sketch
by David Kaneda

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maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings
http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15406

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Writing Response Poems
by Thom Williams

*e.e.cummings is so great. I remember distinctly how I felt when I read it the very first time. I was sort of copping an attitude about its childlike ethos. Then, it slammed into me. He deployed a universal theme, a vast theme-the idea that we are alone, yet tied-in to everything. Each thing that the girls found opened their world and made them come back to themselves. I am healed by the simple things: water, a starfish, the otherorldliness of a crab. I have gone to the sea so many times for peace. In the churning of the sea beneath the jetty, I feel the power of life, and I am part of it, too. The sea reminds me of the power I have to make or break my own way. The true genius of the poem to me is the way it leaves you with an idea you already had but you forgot. A good poem sort of wakes you up to something like a recovered memory, a good one.

When I think about writing a response piece to a poem, I make sure to give myself maximim freedom. My intention is not to analyze the poem; this is not schoolwork. I look at the poem and I let myself find a connection without rules. Pick anything; but pick something that pushes your buttons. I might write about the time I got stung by a jellyfish; how I lifted my arm from the sea and saw the tentacles wrapped around it, how I handled the situation, how it scared me.

I might write about the idea that we are alone and are not alone. Sometimes I think life is like a shipwreck where we are washed up on the shore of existence. We have each other and survival. The constellations stretch over head; they turn by the hour. The sea shows me how to survive. It tells me to be blue and keep many things below the surface. The sea shows me that danger is nearer than I thought, but so is beauty.

Let your response seek its own level, like water. Poetry can be like a river that has been flowing always. It is only for the poet to dip into the flow. Let the current of inspiration push you along a bit. Perhaps imagination is just about to come in on the tide. Perhaps in one more moment some healing or some hope might wash up at our feet. Let your response find you. You'll recognize yourself quite soon.

Let Me Sing Longer

2005-03-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

Writing a Cinquain

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A cinquain (sing-KANE) is a short, unrhymed poem. This style was named and created by Adelaide Crapsy (1878-1914) in the early 1900's. Her poems were not published until after she died.

Its form consists of 22 syllables:

First Line: a one word title (two syllables)
Second Line: a two word phrase that describes the title or you can just use two words (four syllables)
Third Line: a three word phrase that describes an action relating to the title or just actions words (six syllables)
Forth Line: a four word phrase that describes a feeling relating to the topic or just feeling words (eight syllables)
Fifth Line: one word that refers back to the title (two syllables)

The title, due to the shortness of the poem, takes on a greater weight because it is one sixth of the poem.

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Niagara, Seen on a Night in November
by Adelaide Crapsy

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

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Moon Shadows
by Adelaide Crapsy

Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.

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Amaze
by Adelaide Crapsy

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

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Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about reading her poetry and to honor her memory.

Adelaide Crapsey
by Carl Sandburg

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.

And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.

Inside the Rhyme Machine

2005-03-01T18:40:00.000-08:00

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem usually in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The shortness and strict rhyme scheme create a musical effect. This is a good form to practice because it focuses and challenges much of the poet's technical and artistic skills.

There are two main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarchan) and the English (Shakespearean).

The Italian sonnet has a first division (octave) of eight lines rhyming abbaabba and the second division (sestet), consisting of six lines rhyming cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave presents the narrative, states the proposition, or raises a question; the sestet brings the narrative home by making an abstract comment, applying the proposition, or solving the problem.

The English (Shakespearean) sonnet has four divisions: three quatrains (each with a rhyme-scheme of its own) and a rhymed couplet. The typical rhyme-scheme for the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet at the end is usually a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close.

Here is a Web site with a long listing of sonnet poets and their poems:

http://www.sonnets.org/alpha.htm

After reading through the poems at sonnets.org for awhile, you might find it easier to write your own.

Here is one Italian sonnet I found there written by Katharine Lee Bates:

To a Crow

Come hither, taunted bird, and I will stroke
Thy ruffled plumage with a verse, O triste
And sombre minstrel at our Twelfth Night feast,
A music masquerading in thy croak.
How often, when the wild March mornings broke,
Have I descried thee, like a demon priest,
Heaping hoarse curses on the riotous East
From the bare branches of some tossing oak!
Yet ever welcome is thy wizard flight,
--Most welcome now, when Earth lies imaging
The sleep of death beneath a winding-sheet
Of frozen snow intolerably white,
A pallid waste crossed by the sudden, fleet,
Beautiful shadow of thy sable wing.