Quote:
Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling
I'm especially interested in the question of "when is a metaphor dead, and can it be revived, and if so how?!
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Quote:
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
R. W. Emerson, The Poet
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Emerson, of course, is always reaching for the next metaphor himself, and so it would be hard to pin him down to a straightforward answer to "if so, how?!" But the start of an answer, at least, is implicit in his famous definition. If language is fossil poetry--dead metaphor--then making it live again is no more than returning our attention to that original "brilliant picture," away from surface meanings and the habits of linguistic convention, and back to the moment the word first "symbolized the world."
A metaphor,
etymologically speaking, is a "carrying over" or "carrying across," but even knowing that obscure little fact does little to bring the moment of symbolic insight back to life. At that rate, we're stuck at the level of mere intellection. But let a poet, grizzled and icy-eyed, come down to the valley across the high mountain passes, laden with a precious cargo of vision in a battered old pack, and you have
metaphor again . . . as alive and kicking as ever.
Naturally, not every metaphor need be etymological. But Emerson's great insight, I believe, was to remind us that all etymology is metaphorical. Language itself, then--there right under our noses (under our tongues!)--is a boundless source of metaphorical insight and inspiration, if only we choose to look beneath the surfaces of the words we use everyday. Listen to the words, as old Ralph Waldo himself might have put it. Listen to what they have to say.