Make Metaphor Discover

A metaphor is a claim, that A is B in some respect, and you can question it like one. Is the respect true? Is it new to this reader? Does it carry consequences? Paraphrase it, and if the literal version loses nothing, the figure was ornament. The first rule in Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) is never to use a figure you are used to seeing in print, and in his note on “dying metaphors” a newly invented one assists thought by evoking an image, while between the fresh and the dead lies “a huge dump of worn-out metaphors” used “because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 gives its aging speaker boughs that “shake against the cold” and then calls them “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” The sonnet has already said autumn, branches and cold, so why reach for a church? In our reading, the bare boughs are tiers of empty seats. A choir, in the architectural sense, is the part of a church where singers sit, and a choir ruined is one from which the singing has been taken. A plainer description of autumn would have missed the relationship this finds. An aging speaker has lost song as well as leaves, and the pattern of the branches is the pattern of a place built for it. The speaker is not “like” a tree; the poem moves from age to autumn to a ruined building, and each step adds a loss.

Emily Dickinson’s figure goes on discovering. “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” (Editions punctuate this poem differently; Practice 68 shows how much that can matter.) Once hope is a bird, the poem has to ask what else follows. It sings a tune “without the words,” so hope has no argument to offer. It is “sweetest in the gale,” where hope is needed most. And in the chillest land and on the strangest sea, the last stanza says, the bird never, even in extremity, asked a crumb of the speaker. A bird that needs no food from the one it sings for is a strange bird, and in the strangeness the poem finds that hope gives and does not take.

Metaphor probably works by mapping. It carries structure from one domain to another, and the reader transfers relations as well as resemblances, which is why a good metaphor has more than one point of contact and a weak one fails when pressed. Ask what else would be true if the weak figure held, and it has no answer.

Metaphors impose as well as discover. Whatever follows from the vehicle comes in with it, whether you chose it or not, and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) argued this about disease. Her thesis was that “illness is not a metaphor,” and that the most truthful way of regarding it, and the healthiest way of being ill, is the one most resistant to metaphoric thinking. She traced the images attached to tuberculosis and to cancer, including cancer as an invasion by alien cells, and argued that they carried punitive or sentimental fantasies into the sickroom. She also admitted that it is hardly possible to take up residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by such metaphors. Her case concerns real bodies and leaves figures elsewhere alone, but any writer should price the cost it names, that a figure about a real person or illness arrives with entailments that cannot be taken back.

Practice. Collect every figure in a chapter, essay or poem, up to a dozen. For each, write three lines: the tenor (what is being described), the vehicle (what it is compared to), and the relationship in one literal sentence. Then ask what the literal sentence loses, and what else the vehicle brings in that you did not intend. Mark each figure keep, replace with the literal, or rework to follow its consequences. Thirty minutes.