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METAPHORS AND COMPARISONS

 

Here is an interesting 20th century poem to do with intermediate classes, which relies on extended metaphor. People are seen as fish at the bottom of the sea. Keith Douglas fought in North Africa during the Second World War (he was killed there) and this poem seems to reflect off-duty bar life in Cairo or Alexandria, perhaps.

 

Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden

by Keith Douglas

 

As a white stone draws down the fish
she on the seafloor of the afternoon
draws down men's glances and their cruel wish
for love. Slyly her red lip on the spoon

slips-in a morsel of ice-cream; her hands
white as a milky stone, white submarine
fronds, sink with spread fingers, lean
along the table, carmined at the ends.

A cotton magnate, an important fish
with great eyepouches and a golden mouth
through the frail reefs of furniture swims out
and idling, suspended, stays to watch.

A crustacean old man clamped to his chair
sits coldly near her and might see
her charms through fissures where the eyes should be
or else his teeth are parted in a stare.

Captain on leave, a lean dark mackerel
lies in the offing, turns himself and looks
through currents of sound. The flat-eyed flatfish sucks
on a straw, staring from its repose, laxly.

And gallants in shoals swim up and lag,
circling and passing near the white attraction;
sometimes pausing, opening a conversation:
fish pause so to nibble or tug.

Now the ice-cream is finished,
is paid for. The fish swim off on business:
and she sits alone at the table, a white stone
useless except to a collector, a rich man.

 

 

This is a good poem to do "cold" with a class. It may take quite a while before the point of the poem is seen. A pretty girl, who seems out to seduce a rich male, is sitting in an Egyptian tea garden eating ice cream. The 'behaviour of fish' refers to the reactions of the men who "swim" by to inspect her.

 

A key phrase to consider and weigh up is "cruel wish for love" with its oxymoron, suggesting at the start a negative view of this commercialised love. Is she, indeed, a prostitute? Human behaviour is akin to that of fish in this poem and while the men are portrayed very negatively, what are the connotations of the repeated "white stone"? How far is the girl an "agent" ("slyly") and how far a "victim"?

 

The form and the rhyming should be noticed and considered? The tone of voice, the choice of words and of course, central to the poem is the extended metaphor of fish being attracted not to a fish, but to a white stone. The style is very informal, while keeping to a discipline of sorts – the near rhymes and the quatrains, which structure the poem. It is almost humorous in its comparisons except that the situation with its potential for cruelty as well as for love (what sort of love?) is ultimately more serious. Relationships here are ephemeral and to do with power, riches, trophies ( "a collector") and the involvement of these things with beauty and human attraction.

 

This poem goes well with "Upon Julia's Clothes" which is also based on sexual attraction.

 

Allegory is a bit like an extended metaphor. It usually compares a complex situation (choices in life, for example), to a simpler one. "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a good example to do in class at pretty well any level. So, too is "Up-Hill" by Christina Rossetti, which we will consider here.

 

 

 

Read it through with them carefully and then ask them in pairs to come up with ideas.

 

A Poison Tree

 

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree. 

 

William Blake

 

Here are some extra questions:

  • How do pupils react when they are angry with friends? Why or when do we bottle up our anger. Is anger always a bad thing?

  • Who is worse morally, the persona who deliberately grows poison or the enemy who tried to steal it (and got his  just desserts…??)?

  • Is nature innocent or corrupt? Or is it just humans who are corrupt in this poem?

  • What does the "pole" seem to suggest? (Pole star? Tree? Moral navigation…?)

  • How is revenge seen in this poem? Are we invited to make a judgment?

  • Is this related in any way to the Garden of Eden and the story about the first Temptation?

  • What gender is the persona? Any clues?

  • How should we feel about the transparence of the persona's admission of his or her culpability? S(he) seems to take pleasure in the "soft deceitful wiles". Does the transparence make us more or less on the side of the persona?

  • Why are there so many "and"s in the poem?

  • Refer back to "The Sick Rose" for the context of this poem. Also, look at the illustration which accompanies it. Are there any surprises there? How might it add to your reading?

 

 

UP-HILL   

by: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

 

 

DOES the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

 

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

You cannot miss that inn.

 

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

They will not keep you standing at that door.

 

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

 

 

 

This is a poem, which works well for intelligent junior (4e/3e) classes who are starting to develop close reading skills, as well as for older pupils.

 

To begin with, read the poem out aloud, slowly and carefully, making sure that you read the questions (the two longer lines in each stanza) in a slightly different tone of voice from the assured and reassuring second voice, who answers in the shorter lines. There's no need at this stage to point out that there are two voices. Let them spot this.

 

You can start by asking whether they think the notion of "uphill" is positive or negative. Deal with any difficult vocabulary like "wayfarers" or "inn", asking always for the connotations of phrases like "dark hours".

 

In my experience, only gradually will pupils start to see this as an allegory – "the road of life". All starts to fall into place then, though there needs to be further time for consideration of "tone of voice". With fewer Bible readers these days (see the later Section), the "Yea" at the end, may not be recognized as biblical at first.

 

I find this (and I think pupils do too) a very simple and moving poem about life after death – seen in a Christian context. Whether one is a believer or not, the expression of life as a journey, where we will be made welcome at the end, is very reassuring and comforting.

 

There is one line they might consider more carefully:  what are the implications of "Of labour you shall find the sum"? The tone here is more lofty and austere. "Although there are beds for all, those who deserve more will get more" seems to be the rather mixed message of the poem, reflecting perhaps some of the confusions of Christianity itself: is heaven gained by faith or by good works?

 

One doesn't at this stage want to get into theological discussions too much so I tend to find myself telling 4e level pupils (aged 13/14, "Of course children will find this very reassuring", as if WE "adults" can be more nuanced in our approach.

 

What should then be looked at is the structure of the poem, noting the longer lines, the simplicity and authority of the answers, the anxiety of the questions, the simple ballad form.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A harder allegorical poem is "Because I could not Stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson (printed below). Pupils need to be alerted to the possibility of symbolic readings and it should not be long before they pick up on the idea that this seems to be a journey to the cemetery, passing through the stages of a life while doing so.

 

What is extraordinary in this poem is way it very coolly sets out what could easily be seen as a conventional seduction scene. Pupils often miss what is so unconventional: namely, that a girl, wearing hardly anything, is picked up at night, alone, by a stranger, a man. The gendering of the poem is uncompromising, as it is also in "My Life had stood, a Lonely Gun" and others (curiously she adopts a male persona in "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"…). One might consider the relationship in her poems between death or dying and sex, or sublimated sex – but with older classes, perhaps.

 

Philip Larkin is a writer who used metaphors and comparisons in an often ironic and deliberately ambiguous way. Two poems, which are easily down-loadable and could be compared, with older pupils, are  "The Whitsun Weddings" and "Here". They are both based on railway journeys  (journeys often symbolise a movement towards some discovery). The first is heading towards London and the later one, from London, past Hull (where Larkin lived and worked for many years, though the cities are not explicitly named in the poem) until the journey stops at the sea. Get pupils to consider the ambiguities of the images in the final lines and the weight of the three last words.

 

                            Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

 

"The Whitsun Weddings", where the poet is travelling with many newly-weds, as they head for London and their honeymoons, speculates on the lives ahead of all of them, and finishes by imagining them as "an arrow-shower". There is a lot of deliberate ambiguity about this final image. Arrows can kill, but rain is life-giving.

 

                               We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

 

"Here" by contrast, ends with the lonely solitude of a beach "unfenced existence", "beyond reach". The ambiguity of the final image (it is not really a metaphor, though the sea is often referred to in symbolic terms (see Larkin's and Keats' poems on the sea in COMPARING TEXTS) is that there are negative and positive possibilities in solitude. Being "out of reach" may be pleasant (the poem seems suspicious of people generally), but the pleasures may also be out of reach. 

 

Because I could not stop for Death – (479)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

 

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

 

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

 

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

 

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

 

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

 

We have so far been considering poetry. Here now are some interesting extracts of prose, where a consideration of the imagery is very revealing. The first is  well known and comes from Dickens' novel Hard Times; it is the highly rhetorical, scathing description of Coketown, the archetypical industrial town, ruined and polluted.

 

Chapter 5: THE KEY-NOTE

 

     ... Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

    It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

    These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

    You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen

 

 

The second extract is taken from Laurie Lee's 'A Rose for Winter', where he writes about his return to Andalusia after a gap of fifteen years to find a country ravaged by civil war.

 

A brilliant November morning with a sky of diamond blue above the bay and the red flowers of a long summer still glowing darkly on the Rock. The intense blackness of the lampless night had rolled away to reveal, incandescent on the northern horizon, the country we had come to seek. It crouched before us in a great ring of lion-coloured mountains, raw, sleeping and savage. There were scarred and crumpled valleys, the sharp peaks wreathed in their dusty fires, and below them the white towns piled high on their little hills and the empty roads running crimson along the faces of the cliffs. Already, across the water, one heard, or fancied one heard, the sobbing of asses, the cries and salty voices cutting through the thin gold air. And from the steep hillside rose a column of smoke, cool as marble, pungent as pine, which hung like a signal over the landscape, obscure, imperative and motionless.

 

So we left Gibraltar, to its trim English streets, to its Genoese money-changers, Maltese tobacconists, Hindu silk-merchants and crook-boned Cockney soldiers, and we went down to the quay and gathered our bags and boarded the ferry for Spain.

 

The ferry flew the Spanish flag, had paddlewheels, and was old, black-funnelled and squat as a duck. It was the type on might have seen, a hundred years ago, running missionaries up the Congo, loaded with whips and Bibles. But today being Saturday, it was packed to the rails with smugglers. As we moved across the oil-blue waters, innocent in the naked sun, they disposed their Gibraltar loot about them. Strapped to their limbs, under their clothes, went cigarettes, soap, sweets, tinned milk, coffee, corned beef and lots of jars ofd jam. Then the port of Algeciras drew near, and fishermen cried to us from their boats, and we bounced off a yacht, bumped heavily against the quay, and tied up in a tangle, and landed.

 

The acid-yellow stones, the quay littered with straw and palms, the green-cloaked policemen carrying pistols, the lax and amiable formalities of passports and customs; then we stood free at last upon the ground, surrounded by Spain and the smell of fish-boxes. I turned then and spoke, after many years, my first words of Spanish, to a porter, and we understood each other. We bargained, our baggage was loaded on to a handcart, and we entered the town.

 

And here was the scene so long remembered: the bright façades still crumbling in the sun; the beggars crowding the quaysides, picking up heads of fish; the vivid shapely girls, with hair shining like pitch; the tiny delicate-stepping donkeys; and the barefoot children scrambling round our legs. Here were the black signs charcoaled starkly on the walls: ‘Pension La Africana’, Vinos y Comestibles’, ‘España Libre’, ‘Amor! Amor!’ Here were the bars and the talking men, the smell of sweet coñac and the old dry sherries. A clear cold air, churches and oranges, and a lean-faced generation moving against white walls in sharp silhouettes of scarlet and black. It did not take more than five minutes to wipe out fifteen years and to return me whole to this thorn-cruel, threadbare world, sombre with dead and dying Christs, brassy with glittering Virgins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a third passage to consider. It is by Norman Mailer, a writer who mixed fiction and non-fiction very provocatively at times. He is writing here about the Chicago riots of the Sixties.

 

 

       But at Balbo Avenue, just befor Michigan Avenue reached the Hilton, the marchers were halted by the police. It was a long halt. Perhaps thirty minutes. Time for people who had been walking on the sidewalk to join the march, proceed for a few steps, halt with the others, wait, get bored, and leave it. It was time for someone in command of the hundreds of police in the neighbourhood to communicate with his headquarters, esplain the problem, time for the dilemma to be relayed, alternatives examined, and orders conceivably sent back to attack and disperse the crowd. If so, a trap was first set. The mules were allowed to cross Balbo Avenue, then were separated by a line of police from the marchers, who now, several  thousand compressed in this one place, filled the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Balbo. There, clammed by police on three sides, and cut off from the wagons of the Poor People's March, there, right beneath the windows of the Hilton which looked down on Grand Park and Michigan Avenue, the stationary march was abruptly attacked. The police attacked with tear gas, with mace, and with clubs, they attacked like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing. Seen from overhead, from the nineteenth floor, it was like a wind blowing dust, or the edge of waves riding foam on the shore.

            The police cut through the crowd one way, then cut through them another.  They chased people into the park, ran them down, beat them up; they cut through the intersection at Michigan and Balbo like a a razor cutting a channel through a head of hair, and then drove columns of new police into the channel who in turn pushed out, clubs flailing, on each side, to cut new channels, and new ones again. As demonstrators ran, they reformed in new groups only to be chased by the police again. The action went on for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, with the absolute ferocity of a tropical storm, and watching it from a window on the nineteenth floor, there was something of the detachment of studying a storm at evening through a glass, the light was a lovely gray-blue, the police had uniforms of sky-blue, even the ferocity had an abstract elemental play of forces of nature at battle with other forces, as if sheets of tropical rain were driving across the street in patterns, in curving patterns which curved upon each other again.

 

Norman Mailer   Miami and the Siege of Chicago. 1968

 

 

 This is evidently an extract from an article on a serious incident that took place in Chicago. To begin with, it reads like newspaper journalism and it appears to be objective reportage with descriptions about how the marchers assembled, how the police reacted and what exactly happened, stage by stage.

 

It is only at the end of the first paragraph that we learn where the viewpoint of the narrator is – up above the conflict on the top floor of an expensive hotel.

 

More disturbingly, the narration does not seem to care about the apparent injustice of the proceedings, but describes the aesthetic “beauty” of the scene from this remote viewpoint.

 

Looking more closely at the language, we notice the degree of rhetoric – metaphors, repetitions, careful balancing of sentences, rhythm and colourful imagery, all contribute to making this piece an aesthetically “artistic” piece of writing, which is disturbing considering its content.

 

In particular, here, let's focus on the images and comparisons. There is the chainsaw, the razor, the tropical storm, the sea. How are these comparisons being used and to what effect?

 

 He doesn’t seem to care about the terrible injustice being inflicted by the police on the innocent crowd. For him it becomes an exercise in style, an opportunity to write poetic journalism. The attack to him, from the safety of the nineteenth floor of the Hilton, seems as “natural” as a tropical storm – and as beautiful. Yet, disturbing as the effects of this narration may be,  there is something also very assured about the writing. The writer may be playing a game, but he knows just what he is doing and is ENJOYING himself. Probably enjoying making us dislike him!!

 

 

 

METAPHORS & COMPARISONS

 

I used to get quite muddled at school between metaphors, similes, images and symbols.

 

Let's start with images and imagery. Images are first of all pictures, but in literature they go beyond simple visual experiences.   Ezra Pound described an image as an  "emotional complex" and if you go back to the Pound poem in the second section, you will get a sense of how images can be thought of in these terms.

 

A simple image, for example, could be just the word "tree". Looking at the context literarily, there might be connotations of strength, protection, an appeal to nature, or, if it were in a forest at night, the trees might be felt to be more threatening, hiding predators or robbers. Look at the Wordsworth poem in the previous section again and consider the last line in terms of the images "rocks, and stones and trees".

 

Much of language is metaphorical. When we say that we "gleaned" something from a report, or that someone's heart turned to stone, we are using language metaphorically. "Heart" and "stone" are both images, which are being used metaphorically here.

 

The value of metaphors and comparisons increases when they appeal to our imaginations in fresh and vivid ways. When Enobarbus describes Cleopatra's flight from the sea battle and says, "Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt…..The breese upon her, like a cow in June, Hoists sails and flies," there is first of all the surprise element that the most glamorously exotic woman in Egypt should be likened to an English "cow in June" who has been bitten by the "breese", in other words a gadfly. There is next, a  linguistic neatness that "breese" sounds like the wind and the rhyme of "sails" for "tail" also fits neatly. The image we finally get is deliberately comic and ridiculous, with Antony "like a doting mallard", chasing after her.

 

Similes are similar to metaphors, but they are explicit comparisons, preceded by "as" or "like". Metaphors pretend that the comparison is real: "nag of Egypt" is a metaphor (Cleopatra is, then, an old horse), whereas "like a cow" is a simile. Somewhere in the middle is "the breese", which hovers between being a metaphorical gadfly or part of the simile and a play on the word "breeze".

 

Extended metaphors are sometimes referred to as "conceits". The Renaissance mind liked to see correspondences and links (cf "The Elizabethan World Picture" by Tillyard) and the use of conceits and elaborate allegories (like 'The Faerie Queen' for example) was widespread.

 

Personification is another way of being metaphorical. The comparisons made in the poems "The Eagle" and  "Hawk Roosting" in COMPARING TEXTS rely on the birds being thought of in human terms. Look too, at the poem by Donne in "Death, be not proud" in EROS & THANATOS where Death is personified.

 

Symbols are a bit like metaphors, but here the comparison is more generally recognisable. The lion, for example is a symbol of royalty, like the sun. The lion can symbolise pride, too. The rose stands as a symbol traditionally for physical love, passion, femininity.

 

Q. What do trees and apples stand for in terms of symbols? Gardens? Positive? Negative?

 

Ask pupils of any year how they read 'A Poison Tree' by William Blake in terms of the symbols. 

 

All writing uses metaphors and images to develop comparisons and symbolic ideas. What is important as writers AND readers is that these should not become stale or reductionist in practice.  

 

 

 

Discussion could start with the idea of journeys in general back to a place one has known well. Nostalgia? Recognition? Delight? Exasperation? How do we feel about journeys?

 

Students may need some guidance here (a careful assessment of how positive, negative or ambiguous the details and images are) in order to reveal the multiple ambiguities of this passage. The writer loves Spain and responds to the beauty of the country, first of all seen from afar – from the Rock of Gibraltar, but he is also alive to the cruelty, the poverty and what he sees, at the end, as the hypocrisy of Catholicism here. Consider the comparison with the Congo and the ambiguity of missionaries armed with whips and Bibles.

 

​

 

Try then to let the students find out for themselves the ambiguities of the passage. Questions like "How far does the writing make us feel negative or positive towards this journey?" are appropriate. Try to get them to feel the "weight" of each word and image (for example "shapely girls with hair shining like pitch"). How does this extract end?

​Apart from the wonderful rhythms (mechanically suggesting the machinery of this place) created by the repetitions of "like one another" and "fact", the irony of the capitalistic prayer ("world without end, Amen") and  "pious warehouse(s)", pupils could consider the metaphors and similes of "serpents",  and the poor elephant.

 

One of the features of Dickens' writing generally, is that he has enormous FUN writing about horrors. One could compare the superb passage in Ch 21 of  'Oliver Twist' detailing the horrors of Smithfield Market, but in such an exuberantly vivid way, that the passage becomes fun to read out loud.

 

It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping, and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.

Work in a Victorian factory

Chicago riots  August 1968

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