[RCL]

Emerson’s Nature (1836) says some interesting things about figurative language, mostly in Chapter IV.

Chapter IV LANGUAGE

Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, -- so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, -- is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.

etc

[RCL]

Also suggestisve, Frost's "Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue."

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by RCL

Emerson’s Nature (1836) says some interesting things about figurative language, mostly in Chapter IV.

It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Practically verbatim what Blake said. Or Paracelsus or Boehme, whom they both had read.

And all four of them were pretty damn good at coming up with memorable metaphors.

[Kimberly Poitevin]

re: thinking in metaphor. No one's mentioned it yet, so I thought I'd link to Zoltan Kovecses' Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. This is about conceptual metaphor, but a more accessible (and enjoyable) reading than Lakoff, if you ask me.

[Scott Miller]

I'd get on board with the Emerson/Blake definition.

Kimberly: I look forward to checking out that link.

John W.: Interesting question, but isn't Carroll just writing entirely in metaphor? The conceit is, after all, just an extended metaphor. Unless you think he was really writing about walruses, caterpillars and chess pieces...

I've been working on this translation from a Hebrew poem by Moses ibn Ezra, and in researching him, found that he and Maimonides (who were contemporaries) argued about metaphor as well! Ibn Ezra argued that far from being mere window dressing -- a stylistic flourish -- metaphor was central to poetry because it necessitates a synthesis of new understanding.

I wholeheartedly agree. My assertion is that this new understanding is the result of a happy accident when the mind, in shuffling senses together, discovers an unexpected correlative image (grasshoper / sunset, childish dreamland / Enlgish society).

Scott

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Scott Miller

I'd get on board with the Emerson/Blake definition.

Scott,

Naw!

They sound good, but when you really think about them, not so much. "Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts." This is just the doctrine of signatures warmed over, and transferred from botany to linguistics. It's no accident people are talking about Böhme. God placed plants among us to treat physical or spiritual condition, and their forms are signs from him we can learn to read? Yes, and Whitman found letters from God dropped in the street, and each one was signed with God's name!

But forget, for a moment, the origins of these views. Forget their implications, forget how loose their terms are. Here's the real question: Can you make pragmatic use out of them? Emerson believed in "a divine aura which breathes through forms," and wanted poets to speak wildly, so the aura could find its own way, like a slack reined horse. But does that really help us construct new metaphors?

Maybe we shouldn't be trying to reflect the world. Maybe we should be trying to invent the world, to invent reality. "Stop moping, she would cry. Look at the Harlequins!"

Thanks,

Bill

[Scott Miller]

Bill,

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

Maybe we shouldn't be trying to reflect the world. Maybe we should be trying to invent the world, to invent reality. "Stop moping, she would cry. Look at the Harlequins!"

The Harlequins! What a metaphor! And what is says about her spirit, and what she discovered of the divine aura in the forms of trees...

Okay, so we don't all feel it as the divine. But what a spiritual act it is, this invention of reality. How everything which surrounds us seems to glow with meaning... I do get it.

That doesn't mean, by the way, I have to write about God & the moon all the time. And I certainly don't ascribe to the "spiritual facts" part. In my view, that's an oxymoron.

Scott

[Gregory Dowling]

I hope Alicia won't mind my posting this poem from Archaic Smile but it definitely seems to belong here:

Watching the News After the Tornado

"It's like," decides the telecaster,
"A movie set of... some disaster,"
Lacking, in the wake of these
Tornados, useful similes.

But metaphor's the thing that carries
Cold front into warm, that buries
Metal in a man's deep chest,
Uncorks an oak tree with a twist.

The metaphor is green with power,
Spins a hundred miles an hour,
And with a sound of trains it blows
Apart all windows as it goes.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

In a recent interview Marion McCready, a Scottish poet whose first collection, Vintage Sea, I can very warmly recommend, states:

"For me, nature is very much a metaphor for something other than what it is. The bible says that nature is evidence for the existence of God, that God reveals Himself to us through it.[3] This idea of nature as being a kind of sign or symbol for something other than what it is strongly influences how I perceive and write about it."

[3] For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. – Romans 1:20 (New Living Translation)

So MM believes God is speaking to us in metaphors. I find this an appealing sentiment. Has anyone heard this expressed before? There was Yeats' ghost, of course, who told him: "We have come to give you metaphors for poetry".

The rest of the interview is here:
http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/2011...poetry-of.html

Duncan

PS Looking at the thread again, I see RCL and Andrew have already noted that Emerson, Blake, Paracelsus and Boehme were saying similar things.

[RCL]

Has anyone noted Augsustine's On Christian Doctrine? Ran into it when studying Chaucer.

Ralph