“And
now a bubble burst, and now a world”:
The Mutable Magnitudes of Metaphor
It was Shelley, wasn't it, a little high on
the Romantic egotistical sublime, who famously announced that
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
I don't think so. But what I do think is that poets are the
translators of the unacknowledged world, one that we live
very poorly without and that doesn't properly exist at all
without language--by which I mean that very special language
of poetry that we call imagery or metaphor, whether contained
in a single word or unfolded in an elaborate, extended figure.
I wonder, sometimes, if the inner world can simply vanish,
like Atlantis, for want of words, and lie submerged and lost
indefinitely in the restless soul that remains unaware, or
only dimly aware, of something missing. For, as the folk tales
suggest, there are those regions, like I.S.P.'s, that require
passwords: without the magic words, no entrance, no entrancement.
Of the mind-expanding figures of poetic language, some are
more powerfully effective than others in providing this kind
of open sesame. It occurred to me that one way to locate and
investigate poetic metaphor at the top of its spring-opening
bent might be to closely consider some that stick in the mind,
like burrs carried home from distant fields--lines that we
remember for years, long after the context that produced them
has faded. Something happens in those lines to make them memorable,
some extreme liveliness that keeps them active in the mind.
A pair of such lines that has haunted me for years is this
heroic couplet by Alexander Pope from "An Essay on Man:"
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
These lines have kept company with me, though
I had long forgotten the argument of the poem that they came
from. The couplet contains, I think, the kernel of one aspect
of language use that powers the imagination. So let's look
closer and ask what makes these lines so memorable.
Well, as a heroic couplet, it has the great mnemonic devices
of patterned rhythm and rhyme: iambic pentameter, counterpointed
with the trochee, átoms, opening the first line, with
the prescribed end rhymes--"hurled" and "world."
But meter and rhyme are usual for English poems from the 16th
through the 19th Century, and heroic couplets dominate in
much 18th Century verse--most of which, if I ever knew it,
I have certainly forgotten. So the question remains as to
why I should remember those two lines out of so many with
similar rhyme and metric schemes--which always seemed, if
anything, too neat. So what is it here that catches the mind,
and holds?
Allowing for idiosyncrasy, and the fact that my big dream
as a girl was to be the operator of a crane with a wrecking
ball, still I think you can see that what makes the lines
memorable is the way meaning is generated out of two parallel
constructions, both embodying a huge shift in scale, and the
second line amplifying the first. It is this radical scale
shift of similar forms in symmetrical arrangement that is
the key. In the first line, "Atoms or systems" is
constructed as a tight little phrase of alternatives, an unlikely
pair when you stop to think about it. The atom, in the 18th
century when Pope wrote, was believed to be the smallest,
indivisible part of matter, and yet here it is joined as an
alternate to "systems," which denote, oppositely,
very large organizations of many units and kinds of matter.
Then both, at their opposite ends of the scale of size and
complexity, are given a common fate. And "into ruin hurled"
is so strenuously physical an action, that, in spite of the
relative abstraction of those two concepts, we start to get
worried.
And that effect is amplified by the more vivid "bubble"
and "world" of the next line--also at two radically
polar points on scales of magnitude, complexity, and duration;
and also generated as a pair by the parallel construction
of the syntax: now this, now that, and by sharing the same
destructive verb: they burst. Self-similarity in shape at
different scales enhances the effect--both are spheres; in
fact, the planetary roundness of the world is evoked by the
bubble which sets the spherical before our eyes, and fits
the world to it. A bubble is, obviously, the most precariously
ephemeral of actual spheres, and "A bubble burst"
merely a commonplace. But when, in the very same breath and
riding double on the same syntax, comes: "and now a world,"
the easily imaginable bursting bubble makes an instantaneous
world's end seem equally plausible--forcing a major disturbance
in the normally tranquil (or stagnant) waters of the habitual.
The effect of this pairing of incommensurates is to compress
great magnitude of size and the immense duration of a world's
extinction to a single yoked image in an instant of time.
Such a velocity of loss in so compressed a span, with its
creation of another and less flattering sense of proportion,
brings on Pope's next line, which begins "Hope humbly
then...", a quiet imperative at which we are not surprised,
having been prepared to be agreeable to a supremely humbled
hopefulness. The "bubble burst" then takes on its
connotative sense--the traditional metaphoric association
of burst bubbles with lost illusions, hugely inflated hopes
destroyed by their own lack of substance and proportion. Indeed
a world of illusions expired with that figure, and the brevity
and fragility of everything worldly has been given its signature
line. There remains, of course, the sneaky pride we feel at
the powers of our amazingly capacious imagination, that remarkable
generator of vision that lets us see our vaunted species as
the ant under the looming heel of the cosmos. And the rather
eerie composure of these lines, the neat rhyme, in the expression
of utter obliteration, offers as well the comfort of a cheeky
poise.
Now, it is not unusual to see this kind of instantaneous scale-leaping
done visually in film: the camera can link the most dissonant
images, can zoom from a distance shot to a close-up, or cut
to a similar image at a different scale and with an opposite
affect (a hearth fire to a burning city, for instance), and
filmmakers know very well the powerful effect of such conjunctions.
In fact, the direct sensual power of that kind of scale shift
may be more immediately arresting. But it is beyond the direct
and immediate, into the deep mediation of the active imagination,
and the meditation it releases, that the words go, where the
camera, with its graphic representation, cannot.
This is one explanation for why, as the necessarily crude
studies of a quantitative psychology have shown, when you
are watching television, your brain waves are the same as
when you are asleep--and not dreaming. Whereas when you are
reading, the brain waves show a high degree of activity. For
those who like graphs of what any fool could tell you, this
indicates the difference between the effect of visually presented
virtual reality and of imaginative language which calls up
that inner activity, those tireless synaptic bees of the brain,
moving between the flowers and the hive, cross-fertilizing
the one and making honey in the other, connecting the sensorium
with memory and thought, so that the world in the words is
taking shape in the mind of the reader in a way that implicates
more of what you are, opening the doors of a place you hadn't
known you were inside.
That is why, when you see a film of a book you've read, you
often feel that the experience you had as a reader has been
violated, not because the film is bad--it may be first rate,
but because the film both leaves less up to you and asks less
of you, it has a very different effect from the one the book
first had. It isn't about deviation from the plot, or whatever
reasons are usually given for a feeling of betrayal by a film,
but that an internal world has been replaced by an external
one, which, however compelling, is, whatever else its differences,
less endowed with your sentience, less your own.
For when you say, after seeing the film, "She's not my
Jane Eyre," it's not, I suspect, because you had an exact
mental image of how Jane Eyre looked as you read the book
she narrated, but precisely because you didn't. You knew,
in a way hard to define--ineffable but real--who she was,
because, as a reader, you had inhabited her consciousness;
but to try to materialize that figure is to see the hem of
a skirt disappearing around a corner, or the flame of a candle
flicker when a breeze lifts a curtain. What is dependent on
both materiality and language creates that third thing which
marks the transforming encounter between consciousness and
world. We might, if we were so inclined, call it meaning.
Now here is another passage that I have by heart, that has stayed
with me over the years much as the Pope lines have done. These
lines are from the end of T.S. Eliot's extremely un-Wordsworthian
"Preludes:"
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
The power of that simile, even lifted entirely out of its
context in the poem, remains, and derives from a similar
radical scale shift, one that turns the vast and planetary
to the squalid and pathetic on the hinge of the word "like."
The orbital motion of the planets is brought down, in this
jump of both scale and category of being, to the human poverty
and plight of old women forced to forage in the litter of
city lots for the scant means to survive. The word "ancient"
adds significant weight to the merely geriatric, suggesting
generic crones or displaced women reduced to litter-picking
through centuries of repetition--Ruth and Naomi gleaning
the fields, the widows and homeless of history scavenging
the ruins and rubble of war. (I remind you that the poem
was published in 1917, the period of utter disillusion immediately
following the meaningless massacres of World War I.) The
word "revolve" reinforces the sense of something
that goes on habitually, time after time, re-volves, from
its Latin roots, turns and turns again.
And so the verb revolve, when given generic human figures,
becomes an orbit of want, an endless hunting of cast-off
people among abandoned things, while having a retroactive
effect, as well, on outer space or rather our old sense
of the cosmos--emptying it, making the planets themselves
vagrants of vacancy, denuding the heavens of the majesty
endowed by tradition, scale and position, and by what brings
light to night's darkness. The likeness drawn here (between
worlds and crones) is daring in the Modernist way, insistently
surreal, invited by a kind of grotesque congruity, one that
signals dis-location, the forlorn search for lost meaning
carried by this radical down-scale shifting across heretofore
unlike categories. I couldn't help thinking of the current
euphemism "down-size," which is also a word for
the scaling down of the value of individual human beings--the
ironic but inevitable accumulated effect of an unrestricted
self-interest.
"Preludes" is as American a poem as is a painting
by Edward Hopper, which it resembles; it has that cultural
blankness, that urban isolation and disconnectedness: "With
the other masquerades/ That time resumes/ One thinks of
all the lives/ That are raising dingy shades/ In a thousand
furnished rooms"--so that the closing lines comprise
a magnifying chord of that theme. In both the Pope and the
Eliot lines, the worlds themselves have been reduced--one
to remind us of the divine, the other of its absence--by
their hugely compressed scale jump. Eliot activates the
imagination's astonishing spatiality, its seemingly infinite
elasticity--a capaciousness that can, in a single thought,
contain the corner lot and the distant cosmos. "Oh,"
said Hamlet, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and
be king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
For the bad dreams, no ready cure, and thus no cosmic kingship--but
that we exist both minutely bounded, and in infinite space
by the gift of our imaginations, remains true, and is experienced
(rather than just entertained as an idea) in Shakespeare's
metaphor of the "nutshell," which makes of "bounded"
a tiny, walled circumference at the opposite pole from what
"infinite space" invokes--what is beyond measure
and utterly open, without any limits. A breathtaking move.
But the liberating momentum of that leap from shell to space
suddenly collapses, in both meaning and prosody, with that
rush of nearly unaccented syllables: "were it not that
I have" and all the weight of accent falling on the
last two words: bád dréams, reminding us that
imagination conjures up hell as well as heavens.
What all these radical scale shifts release is a high velocity
of mental motion, great energy released from the compression
of difference in scale in a single line or conjoined image:
like a spring-loading mechanism suddenly let go. Warp speed!
What can come of such shifts of scale is not merely some
sensation of excitement, but an enlargement of our perception
and a shift in our sense of proportion, which I take to
be the basis of a non-trivial kind of knowing that has traditionally
been called wisdom. In the West's best-known book of wisdom,
Ecclesiastes, it is famously said: "To every thing
there is a season...", but then, the writer puts the
most disparate of seasons into a single and parallel unit
of syntax: "A time to be born, and a time to die"--so
passes a lifetime in a phrase.
Scale, originally from the Latin scala, a flight of steps,
measures the relative variations of quality or quantity
along a continuum--on one end, a drop; on the other, a deluge.
I get that mismatched pair from a passage by Thomas Lovell
Beddoes, when a drop of water swells from the minute to
the momentous on the turn of a line. Beddoes, a mid-19th
Century English poet, author of several verse dramas, including
Death's Jest Book, a work which makes Edgar Allen Poe seem
cheerful, was also a master of blank verse, wielding it
with a power at times comparable to that of Shakespeare's.
But Beddoes' range was narrower, his vision estranged: his
a perverse world ruled by Thanatos, whose servant Eros has
become; his plays a masque of death, its ruling figures
malign, twisted and grotesque, while all that is lovely
and precious is seen as small, frail and infinitely threatened,
no--doomed, by huge destructive forces. His vision gets
condensed, imaginative force in this passage from a fragmentary
verse play. The speaker is Valeria, whose handmaiden has
just confided her happiness at a dawning love. Valeria compares
the girl to a daisy who feels the first drop of what will
be the world-swallowing flood in the Biblical story of Noah.
To the unsuspecting flower, how sweet that first drop must
have felt!
Here's the passage:
How thou art like the daisy in Noah's meadow,
On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm
And soft at evening: so the little flower
Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the teacherous water
Close to the golden welcome of its breast,
Delighting in the touch of that which led
The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops
Tritons and lions of the sea were warring,
And sometimes ships on fire sunk in the blood
Of their own inmates; others were of ice,
And some had islands rooted in their waves,
Beasts on their rocks, and forest-powdering winds,
And showers tumbling on their tumbling self,
And every sea of every ruined star
Was but a drop in the world-melting flood.
The physical world that embodies this avalanche from delicate
drop to apocalyptic flood is stupendous, and here scale shift
is directed to create, not a wiser sense of proportion, but
a demonic vision of horrifying and ruinous disproportion, where
the open face of the little daisy "in Noah's meadow,"
invites malevolent forces of elemental ruin so disproportionate
as to signal disorder of the first magnitude.
What arises from such a verse is a hopeless vision of doom--but
vision it is, drawing its visionary power from this immense
shift of scale: in 15 lines from the first warm drop of rain
on the little daisy to a cosmic flood that far outruns the scale
of the old Biblical flood. Notice with what speed the turn comes
at the end of line 6:"Delighting in the touch of that which
led"--and, on that single verb, the hinge of scale swings
to the other pole of magnitude, as the sweetly embraced drop
"led/ The shower of oceans," which then takes another
leap of scale from oceans of earth to the cosmic scale of "every
sea" of "every ruined star," the repeated "every"
making the disaster total, wrecked worlds whose spilled oceans
are each "but a drop" in the ruined reaches of interstellar
space consumed in self-destroying cosmic tidal waves. The last
line reinstates the poles, resets the scale factor, by placing
the word "drop" in the same phrase with "flood,"
the same pair with which the poem began, but now both shifted
up to a scale at the very edge of comprehension.
The recurrence of the same form when scales shift hugely causes
imaginative vision to erupt and change the topography of our
understanding. It is only laughable to leap from the elephant
to the flea, however irritating to the elephant or fatal to
the flea. It is the self-similarity at different scales that
makes imaginative lightning strike, altering perspective, illuminating
what had been dark. Or, as in Beddoes case, darkening what had
seemed so bright. His is a sinister magic--in this poem, as
in his work as a whole, the vivacity of life has been stolen
and put to the service of a destructive force: as in war, death
has all the energy. But that energy is the point--in it we read
the condition of a man or an age, or (in writing of the first
power) of both; in Beddoes' case it is an overwhelming expectation
of disaster. And whether we call someone paranoid or prophetic
depends, doesn't it, on what happens next.
Using similar means to Beddoes' but to a quite different end,
the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai engages our ethical sense as
he expands our consciousness of harm through a huge and rapid
expansion of the scale of a diameter, as its title indicates:
THE DIAMETER OF THE BOMB
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
In 16 lines, the circle goes from 12 inches to the infinite--expressing
the size of the damages wrought by the expanding circles of
harm--beginning with the bodies and moving out to the destruction
of any sense of the sacred by which limits of action and sanction
were set in the first place. Even the most secular reader understands
the double negation in that last line, and unlike Beddoes' infernal
universe, here the destruction's source, its solid 30 centimeter
container, is manmade, and thus the poem expresses not despair
but outrage, extending what the military calls collateral damage
to an infinite destruction, a dissolution of all limits, of
whatever moral principles have sheltered us, that court of last
appeal for the innocent and the powerless that we humans have
sometimes called God.
In a single expanding vision, the poem opens continuously and
relentlessly from measured fact into immeasurable grief and
loss. (And this is a human loss, purposely left unmarked as
to nation or tribe.) There is a reciprocal movement taking place
in the diction along with the expansion of imagery, one from
the neutral and material to the emotional and metaphysical,
from matter of fact enumeration to the "howl of orphans"
(which he "won't even mention" thereby reminding us,
as he mentions it, that it is unmentionable, unspeakable). As
the circle of harm and the space it occupies enlarges, the poem's
diction intensifies emotionally, from the flat accounting of
30 centimeters, "four dead and eleven wounded," through
a degree of heightening with generic but suffered words like
"time and pain" and places whose low numbers shelter
the numberless wounded and dead: two hospitals and one graveyard,"
to the more directly apprehended because singular "young
woman/buried" and the "solitary man mourning her death"
to the even younger "orphans" whose howl will finally
take us beyond language, beyond divine appeal, beyond imagining.
As its penultimate line, read alone, says: "beyond, making."
This scale expansion reminds us of the destructive power of
our new technologies, at the same time that it draws on that
same knowledge and technology to imagine this degree of expansion.
With the aid of computers, electron microscopes and space telescopes,
the once unimaginably small and unthinkably large are now available
to us. We can move with unprecedented ease from molecules to
galaxies, these new instruments extending our very limited human
sensory equipment, and with it the magnitude of our sense of
scale. Dante's heavenly spheres, out to the tenth heaven of
his Paradiso, seem meager now, a quaint relic, almost a child's
toy, in the astronomer's universe of today.
And with this expanded sense of scale has come an expansion
in poetry's ability to imaginatively transcend, reverse, open
or compress time itself--which is, of all the spurs to poetic
imagination, perhaps the strongest--since we are, as Shakespeare
said, "the fools of time." We humans--who have always
time-traveled imaginatively, and compressed centuries through
the power of language--have a new amplitude of vision, and can
move with new ease across ever vaster scales of time and space--that
inseparable pair.
We always measured space by movement in time--as ancient people
said the next village was three moons away, meaning that the
walking time to it was three moon cycles or months even as we
say that someone in California lives 6 hours away, meaning the
time it takes to fly there in a plane. And as an imaginative
extension of that experienced connection of distance and time,
we have always equated great distance with far off time, speaking
of the past as if it were distant in space--those long corridors
of time.
Current astronomy has reinforced this perception mightily by
giving it an actual physical analogue. For those distances too
great for human measures of time, we use the fastest mover,
light, measuring the immense distance from stars in light years,
meaning the time the light takes to reach us across space. Because
of the invariable and finite speed of light, which is the speed
limit of the universe, roughly a billion miles per hour--as
light reaches us from farther out into space, we are looking
back in time, seeing a star in historical time, not as it is
but as it was. We see the closest star, our sun, as it was 8
minutes ago; the farthest galaxies as they were billions of
years ago.
The fact that on any starry night we can casually look into
the deep past, makes the imaginative backward gaze across time
seem all the easier to conjure. And as with stars,
when something is very far away, it appears very small; thus
may the very small be taken for the very distant, and great
distance easily be read as long ago time. This is exactly what
happens when minute points of fire magically open up time in
a poem by Sharon Olds, "Summer Solstice, New York City."
The poem is full of metaphors which embody scale shifts, but
the one I want to look at is the one that uses the size/distance/time
illusion to simultaneously compress and expand time at the poem's
close.
By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell saround his own life,
life of his children’s father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighborning building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking ,talking,
whiel the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gatheredin the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a labor and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when it’s found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.
It is the burning ends of the cigarettes at
night, these minute glowing circles of fire, seen in the context
of a human rescue of a man from suicide and endless night, that
suddenly suggest something larger seen at a great, even an immense,
distance, and that distance is temporal: "the red, glowing
ends burned like the/tiny campfires we lit at night/back at
the beginning of the world." The evils of tobacco notwithstanding,
I so love the end of this poem, for the magic of that shift
in time scale, the way it opens the present night as compassion
opens the heart, opens the darkness into that long ago but now
glowing again past moment--drawing us with it, even using, for
the first time in the poem, the first person plural, the individual
"I" subsumed now in the "we." Here is time
present and time past, fire and human community, in a single
figure of thought--one that turns eye witness all at once into
poetic vision.
Something similar happens at the close of the poem "Trying
for Fire" by Tim Seibles. Since we are on real time here,
instead of reading the whole poem (which you can read on your
own ) I'll crudely paraphrase its theme, and focus on the time-scale
leap at the end. The poem is about the let down of growing up,
tracking the lofty expectations of childhood to their crash
landing in the precincts of the present. As it focuses in on
the shrinkage in his own life, Seibles' poem takes a sudden
and breathtaking leap backwards across time, reaching back in
a gesture of empathy and connection, and one that enlarges the
poem from the personal to the species-level of experience. I'll
read just the last two stanzas:
Across the street a woman is letting
her phone ring. I see her in the kitchen
stirring something on the stove. Farther off
a small dog chips the quiet with his bark.
Above me the moon looks like a nickel
in a murky little creek. This
is the same moon that saw me twelve,
without a single bill to pay, zinging
soup can tops into the dark--I called them
flying saucers. This is the same
white light that touched dinosaurs, that
found the first people trying for fire.
It must have been very good, that moment
when wood smoke turned to flickering, when
they believed night was broken
once and for all--I wonder what almost-words
were spoken. I wonder how long
before that first flame went out.
What sets that time travel off is the scale-jumping
simile of the moon as that nickel in the murky creek, played
on the percussive instrument of the k's in look like nickel
murky creek, that accompanies the metaphoric leap from the cosmic
to the inconsequential, expressing the sense of lost childhood
magic and diminished hope that is the poem's subject.
But here, feeling bad for himself is mitigated by connecting
his dashed hopes with that first guttering flame, in a vision
that makes us all, from day one, kin in disappointment. What
is most enchanting here, I think, is how he achieves intimacy
in that huge temporal reach, how compression becomes synonymous
with compassion. And species-pity has a way of transcending
self-pity, getting us up off the couch of self-concern and into
that same boat we're all in. There is the strange fact about
language and empathy, which the novelist Walker Percy muses
over in an essay, that a depressed man on a commuter train feels
less depressed when reading a book about a depressed man on
a commuter train. Then, too, I think the end of the poem, for
all its ruefulness, makes us feel a kind of elation at the way
the eons-long candle snuffer of its language could reach all
the way back and put out that first flame at the very beginning
of human time.
Thinking back over these scale-jumping similes--"the glowing
ends of cigarettes in Sharon Olds' poem seen as tiny campfires
at world's beginning," Tim Seibles'"moon like a nickel
in a murky creek," Eliot's "worlds revolving like
ancient women"--reminds us that it is metaphor, at both
its most intense and its most extensive, that we've been looking
at all along. As Mary Kinzie says in A Poet’s Guide to
Poetry: "At the heart of metaphor is the act of providing
a visible object with implied value--in other words, making
the small 'large,'... citing the small to implicate the great.
" In essence, the meaning that accrues when a figure of
thought makes words take on their full weight of suggestion
and significance makes the smallest detail potentially large
in meaning, implying that little A is like or corresponds to
something else, Big but intangible B, and that B is what we
need to know but couldn't bring to light without particular
and particulate A as its vehicle of visible perception. Metaphor,
then, involves an implied or intrinsic scale shift, from the
singular to the universal, the concrete to the more abstract
or philosophical--the physical and singular object or person
a carrier, like the trucks of Greece that have metaphoros painted
on the side, transporting an insight or truth beyond the particular
instance that embodies it--and so, by this transport, altering
our perspective.
What I am suggesting is that among the most memorable and deeply
satisfying metaphoric devices to be found in poems are those
images where the metaphoric infrastructure becomes explicit,
expanded, and full-throated--and the radical scale shift is
dramatically present in the language. As in May Swenson's poem,
"The Promontory Moment," in which she dramatizes that
moment when our view, like the sun's, is promontory, that is,
a view from the headland (pun intended), what we have been calling
imagination: "Think of only now, and how this pencil tilted
in the sand, might be a mast,/its shadow to an ant marking the
sun's place./ Little and vast are the same to that big eye."
In essence, it is that god-like sun's eye that we, and the poem,
for a moment, share, which, as in the Pope couplet with which
I began, gives us our greatest power of vision, and therefore
our most acute sense of our intractably real limitations.
For Swenson's poem not only revels in the promontory view, but
reveals a death at its heart--for the promontory is equally
the premonitory. As she describes fishermen casting into the
surf, her choice of words identifies their catch with our own
mortal plight: "Until, beneath the chips of waves/a cheek
rips on the barb; a silver soul is flipped from the sea's cool
home into fatal air." The fish, we learn at the last, is
a sea-robin--robin, the bird/bard and harbinger of spring. The
final stanza ends with this doubleness, first, the power of
the time-and-space-transcending eye of the imagination with
which we are endowed: "The eye, also a sun, wanders,/and
all that it sees it owns." But consider what that scale-shifting
eye sees as it scans the scene, and with what forever stilled
image she ends the poem: "The filled sail, tacking the
line between water/and sky, its mast as high as this pencil,/becomes
the gull's dropped quill, and the fleece/of the wave, and the
sea robin's arc/now stilled on the rock."
As I bring this talk toward a close, I want to suggest that
these mutable magnitudes of metaphor, these immense leaps in
scale explain not only why certain lines or poems are so memorable,
but offer a means to overcome the flatness and shallowness of
too much of our poetry when it clings too closely to the discursive
speech of the easily understood or the journalistically reportable.
Above all, as we leave the shallows, the puddle-jumping poetry
of language used as a recording device and not as a laser to
cut away the cataracts of conventional usage, we find a poetry
of visionary imagination whose larger perspective offsets our
more customary, circumscribed and ego-driven vantage points.
When the imagination is at its most active and capacious, when
metaphor explicitly makes radical leaps across scale, what it
reveals is, ultimately, our limits and with them our folly and
pretensions, and so restores the sanity of a truer perspective.
During the Second World War when the expression of such a vision
made him a pariah, a Cassandra as he called himself, Robinson
Jeffers wrote this poem, with its promontory view from the Northwest
coastal cliffs. I want to end this talk with his scale-shifting,
oceanic metaphor for a larger, planetary vision:
THE EYE
The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific--
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave little men
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of powers, clash of faiths--
Is a speck of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea--look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
