Metaphor

METAPHOR.  A condensed verbal relation in which an idea, image, or symbol may, by the presence of one or more other ideas, images, or symbols, be enhanced in vividness, complexity, or breadth of implication.

The nature and definition of metaphorical terms and of the relations between them have both been matter for much speculation and disagreement.  It is unlikely therefore that a more specific definition will at first be acceptable.  The metaphorical relation has been variously described as comparison, contrast, analogy, similarity, juxtaposition, identity, tension, collision, fusion; and different views have been held regarding the nature, operation, and function of metaphor in poetry.  In recent years the view has gathered weight that m. is the radical process in which the internal relationships peculiar to poetry are achieved; some critics maintaining that m. marks off the poetic mode of vision and utterance from the logical or discursive mode; others, usually on anthropological evidence, that all language is m. The traditional view, however, is that m. is a figure of speech, or a family of tropes, involving two (occasionally four) operative terms, and that it is used for adornment, liveliness, elucidation, or agreeable mystification.

The view of m. as tropical may be considered first.  For this view Aristotle is taken to be the prime authority, particularly in his statement that “metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy” (Poetics 1457 b).  Some of these instances of “transference” have been classed by grammarians – not without ingenuity and precision – under such names as synecdoche, metonymy, catachresis, and so on – the terms not coinciding with Aristotle’s division.  And Aristotle’s fourfold classification is found, without significant qualification, at the end of a neoAristotelean pronouncement in 1950 (see Crane, Critics and Criticism. 1952, pp. 80-82).

Grammarians since Cicero and Quintilian, again on Aristotle’s authority (though based upon the Rhetoric where the discussion is limited to prose), have insisted upon the harmony or congruity of metaphorical elements, and upon a measure of visual clarity.  Hence the traditional condemnation of “mixed metaphor” and the limiting of m. to a descriptive or expository function: so that, for example, George Campbell (Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1841) writes: “In metaphor the sole relation is resemblance.”  Grammarians, noticing some logical incongruity between the elements in m., have also suggested that m. not only transfers and alters meaning but may also pervert it; and this suspicion is preserved in the single definition offered by SOED: “Metaphor.  The figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object to which it is not properly applicable” (cf NED: “… some object different from. but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable”).  Philosophers particularly have indulged the suspicion – at least as old as Locke, though recently much encouraged by Wittgenstein – that m. is an “improper” connection of terms, regarding m. as a decorative but inexact alternative to what honest and forthright consideration would disclose in a literal form. and implying that the use of m. is a mark of carelessness, haste, or intellectual unchastity (cf Poetics 1458b 17 which, if read out of context, might seem to support this view).

Traditionally, m. has been represented as a trope of transference in which an unknown or imperfectly known is clarified, defined, described in terms of a known.  This is exhibited as an overt or implied predication of the form (a) A is [like] B, or (b) A is as B – that is, A is [like X] as B [is like Y].  In this scheme a m. is explicated by translating it into a predicative form that will reveal the relation of resemblance.  For example: (a) 1. “Love is a singing bird” = “Love is like a singing bird” or “Love makes you feel like (or, as though you were listening to) a singing bird”; 2. “the proud nostril-curve of a prow’s line” = “a prow’s line with the same curve as a proud man’s nostril”; 3. “Her head … with its anchoring calm” = “Her head that, with its air of calm, makes you feel as secure (? and hopeful) as an anchor would in a ship”; 4. “a Harris-tweed cat” = “a cat that looks (smells, feels) as though it were made of Harris tweed”; (b) 5. “My love is ... begotten by despair upon impossibility” = “My love is conceived as though its father were despair and its mother impossibility”; 6. “Hatred infects the mind” = “Hatred is like an infection in the mind”; 7. “Admiral earth breaks out his colours at the forepeak of the day” = “The earth discloses its colors in the morning with the same abrupt brilliance as the breaking-out of an admiral’s colors (ensign) at the forepcak of his flagship.”  

All these examples happen to be “good” metaphors; the only objection would be to the method of exposition.  Certainly there are “low-grade” metaphors, e.g., “Animal life always lives in the red,” “He bull-dozed his way through all difficulties”; and the term “prosaic” m. might be used to mark these off from the “essential” m. that has preoccupied 20th-c. criticism. e.g., “the mill of the mind / Consuming its rag and bone.”  But such a distinction would turn less upon a definable difference in verbal events than upon the reader’s (or writer’s) attitude to m. in any particular passage.  A m. becomes “dead” when the user forgets or does not know that a metaphorical relation was in the past implied or is still capable of being implied (e.g., “arrive” = late L. arribare, adripare, ad ripam [appelere, venire] = to call ashore, to come ashore or into harbour).  The “prosaic” m. concentrates upon describing, clarifying, delineating, comparing – or is seen as doing so –, and is – or is seen as – subject to the limitations of plausibility or of logical harmony.  “Essential” m. deals in – or is seen as dealing in – a more complex, instantaneous, and even non-logical relation.

An unprejudiced examination of the examples given above suggests that although analysis by resemblance may be suitable for analysing resemblance, it is inadequate – even irrelevant – in most of these cases if we take into account not merely some notion of semantic equivalence but the actual sensation these metaphors induce.  First, the apparently simple metaphors 1 and 4 have at least two or three simultaneous meanings; and this occurs not because of a variety of resemblances but because of a substantial though paradoxical co-incidence of terms; each term preserves its distinctness, yet in the momentary coincidence – or identity (to use a term applied at least as early as 1930 by Bowra) – each term is changed.  Second, examples 3 and 6 show that what appears to be a simple two-term relation can be a condensed four-term relation.  Third, the function of the transitive verb in analogical m. (A is to X as B is to Y) is very important (with “hatred infects the mind” cf “hatred is [like] an infection in the mind” or “hatred works in the mind as infection works in the body”); to reduce or expand an analogical m. to predicative form destroys its vitality.  These results may be tentatively consolidated.  The radical form of m. is either A is B (a momentary or hypothetical identity being involved), or simply A-B (parataxis, the juxtaposition of two terms, e.g., “sphinx-woman” and 2, 3, 4 above).  The analogical m. achieves strength and avoids a simple relation of resemblance by forming itself around a transitive verb (e.g., “bright chanticleer explodes the dawn,” “the ship ploughs the waves”).

Historically, however, the view of m. as primarily a figure for extending description, comparison, and exposition reflects literary rather than critical obtuseness.  Rosamund Tuve, for example, has pointed to the 16th-c. emphasis, in handbooks and in practice, upon the delight roused by deft and sustained translatio, the exploration by metaphorical means of minute similarities within clearly defined fields of relationship (see Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, 1947, pp. 121ff., 223-24).  Guided by a clear notion of the didactic and explicatory function they wished m. to serve, writers of that period saw no reason to extend or explore the outer reaches of m.  And Milton’s use of epic simile, as compared with the Homeric use, is a refined development of translatio in the direction of multiple logical resemblances (see SIMILE below).  Although at practically all periods we find instances of m. serving important poetic functions outside the scope of the received grammatical definition, these were evidently not thought important enough to modify the definition.  Even the extended range of m. used by, say, Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne happened not to be matched by any extension in analysis or theory.  And if Johnson may be regarded as representative of his age, he looked back at least two centuries when he said: “As to metaphorical expression, that is a great excellence in style, when it is used with propriety, for it gives you two ideas for one.”

In fact, Aristotle’s doctrine of m., though fragmentary, was far more comprehensive than his successors had reason clearly to recognize.  He had also said that “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.  It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” (Poetics 1458b; cf Rhetoric 1405a); and that “from metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh [new]” (Rhetoric 1410b), that “Liveliness [?energy] is specially conveyed by metaphor” (Rhetoric 1412a), and that “of the four kinds of Metaphor the most taking is the proportional [4-term analogical] kind” – e.g., “The sun sheds its rays” (Rhetoric 1411a).  He had not only implied a sharp distinction between the uses of m. in prose and in poetry, but had also emphasized the energetic character of m. by choosing examples, not in predicative form, but as formed around vigorous verbs.  In showing the relation between riddle and m. he had in a sense anticipated the doctrine of paratactic m.  But tradition, and many later critics, neglected these niceties.

Although discussion about m. during the last thirty years has been concentrated upon “essential” m., the discourse has often carried within itself relics of the grammarians’ empire, unexpunged because unexamined.  The grammarians’ view of m., however, cannot be dismissed as altogether irrelevant; for the grammarian has a legitimate claim to pronounce upon the form and use of figures as far as these can be manipulated according to rhetorical technique.  Nor can the “prosaic” m. be banished from poetry as “not a genuine m.”; for the dividing line between “prosaic” and “essential” m. is never in general distinct, and what is a “prosaic” m. in isolation may become an “essential” m. by being put back into its context or by an appropriate adjustment of the reader’s attention.  Most grammarians and many literary critics have failed to notice that the matrix of a m. – the vital context, often considered over a wide range ­– is an indispensable component of “essential” m.  Once precise control of the matrix is lost – and one’s memory of the history of a word can be an important part of the matrix – the m. dies.

The publication within less than ten years of Grierson’s edition of Donne, Hopkins’ poems, Eliot’s Waste Land, three volumes of Yeats’s mature poetry, Pound’s paraphrases of Fenollosa, and Joyce’s Ulysses brought to attention poetic facts and relations that were not to be explained on the traditional view.  The New Criticism, which first established itself less as a systematic order of criticism than as a method of explication with a strong pedagogical bias, was quite early overtaken by the clamorous but intermittent inquiry into m. and symbol which has dominated criticism in this century.  If there are few modern examinations of m. on any scale of completeness, this is to be explained by a remark of Middleton Murry (1927): “The investigation of metaphor is curiously like the investigation of any of the primary data of consciousness: … Metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself, and speech as ultimate as thought.  If we try to penetrate them beyond a certain point, we find ourselves questioning the very faculty and instrument with which we are trying to penetrate them” (in Countries of the Mind, 2d ser., 1931, p. 1).

Eliot’s doctrine of the unity of sensibility in Donne may first have raised the question how widely disparate elements came to be unified in poetry; but it was the deliberate and powerful articulation of symbol and myth (sometimes private symbol and myth) by Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce that raised some even more awkward questions.  Pound’s doctrine – which he shared with the Fr. symbolistes – that m., like the Chinese ideogram, was a matter of abrupt juxtaposition, carried the question beyond grammatical limits and suggested a direct connection with Aristotle’s mimesis.  Certainly the implied extension of this principle of juxtaposition in Eliot’s Waste Land, in Joyce’s Ulysses, and in Pound’s Cantos showed that large-scale ryhthms could be secured within a whole work by the abrupt juxtaposition of blocks of disparate material and by swift unmodulated shifts of emphasis from one focus to another over a large or small scale.  Nevertheless there is danger in allowing the term “metaphor” to become too inclusive.  Some anthropological arguments, and even Empson’s illuminating analysis of the metaphorical structure of drama, seem to move toward the conclusion that any juxtaposition whatsoever is m.  The corollary would be that no combination of words is not-metaphorical: and a useful term and a fruitful distinction is thereby destroyed.

The view that the term m. could legitimately be extended was encouraged by the work of Max Müller (1862-65) and by a succession of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists who have studied the genesis and history of language.  These have produced conflicting and even misleading hypotheses, and by customarily neglecting the evidence of developed literature have provided results not always serviceable to literary criticism.  But they have helped to confirm the conclusion, drawn with increasing insistence from literary evidence, that in m. we see that “most vital principle of language (and perhaps of all symbolism)” (Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 1953 ed., p. 112; here discussing Philip Wegener), and that “The genesis of language is not to be sought in the prosaic, but in the poetic side of life” (Otto Jesperson, Language, 1933).  Shelley incidentally had already noticed this in a luminous if isolated passage: “Language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until words, which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures oi integral thoughts: and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (Defence of Poetry).

The link with a rhetorical past was not easily broken.  Much effort – both before and since the 1920’s – has been spent on contriving terms suitable for describing how m. works: with distinctions between “what was said” and “what was meant,” between “literal” and “metaphorical” meaning, between “idea” and “image,” “form” and “figure,” and so on.  But it is dangerous to assume a readily distinguishable external datum of literality, for the literal meaning in each        is determined within the context; and the way Richards’ terms “tenor” and “vehicle” fluctuated, even in his own hands (1936), arises from his attempt to answer both the question “how does metaphor work?” and the much more profitable question “what happens in a metaphor?”  Some answers to this second question turned up not through consistent analysis but in more or less isolated apperçus.  T. E. Hulme’s dictum that “the great aim [in poetry] is accurate, precise and definite description” (Speculations, 1924) obviously needed repudiating.  Richards stated in 1925 that m. is “the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from the combinations which the mind then establishes between them.  There are few metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical relations involved” (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1925, p. 240).  C. Day Lewis’ neat epigram has been influential: “We find poetic truth struck out by the collision rather than the collusion of images” (The Poetic Image, 1947, p. 72).  Richards’ Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), though disappointing, emphasized the “organizing” activity in some kinds of m., pointed out that a word may be simultaneously “literal” and metaphorical, and introduced Coleridge into the discussion – a man who had already made at least a perceptive route-traverse of the country with the eye of a psychologist and linguist as well as of a poet and critic.  John Crowe Ransom’s introduction, from idealist philosophy, of the term “concrete universal” provided a useful name for an old and abiding paradox of poetry: that poetry evokes its universals not by generalizing or direct description but by an acute concentration upon the concrete particular, discovering directness in obliquity.

Max Black’s analysis (Aristotelean Society, 1955) provides a useful summary and stopping place.  He wished to assail the philosophical commandment “Thou shalt not commit metaphor” and in looking for a use of m. acceptable in philosophical discourse analysed previous accounts of m. into three “views”: substitution, comparison, and interaction.  The first two he dismissed (with qualifications), but found that the third, as represented chiefly by Richards (though again with some qualifications), offered “some important insight into the uses and limitations of metaphor.”  He starts with Richards’ definition: “In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction” (Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. 93); but rejects the word “interaction” in favor of the image of a filter.  The metaphor-word – the focus – calls up a system of “associated commonplaces” which are in turn related with various aspects of the principal subject: e.g., “Man is a wolf.”  “The metaphor [in this case] selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the principal subject by implying statements about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject.”  Although Black recognizes that the elements of m. are “systems of things,” rather than “things,” and insists that these metaphors are untranslatable and that the secondary implications of a m. can be extremely intricate, his illustrations – as one would expect of a philosopher – are stated in propositional form.  The outcome then is actually a comparison-metaphor, though of a much more highly organized and finely controlled kind than the comparison-metaphor recognized by tradition.  Richards had clearly intended to go beyond his point, as some of his uses of the terms “tenor” and “vehicle” show.  He wanted to talk about the “total meaning” of m. as arising from the interaction of elements.  He had quoted Coleridge with approval: “A symbol is characterized by the translucence of the special in the individual … It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity, of which it is the representative.”  He seems to have chosen the word interaction with care: it allowed him to think of the metaphorical elements as preserving their integrity, and to think of the “total meaning” as the outcome of the impact of elements rather than as a derivative by comparison, fusion, or combination.  If he had written his book ten years later he might have said that “interaction” was not like chemical combination but like nuclear fission.  Richards’ view is not definitive, but it either represents or has stimulated much of the more recent discussion.  W. B. Stanford’s definition, quoted with approval by W. K. Wimsatt in a review of Martin Foss, includes all the aspects Richards seems to have envisaged: “Metaphor is the process and result of using a term (X) normally signifying an object or concept (A) in such a context that it must refer to another object or concept (B) which is distinct enough in characteristics from A to ensure that in the composite idea formed by the synthesis of the concepts A and B and now symbolized in the word X, the factors A and B retain their conceptual independence even while they merge in the unity symbolized by X” (Greek Metaphor, 1936, p. 101).

An important adjunct to these views – and it is contained within the word “process” – was the New Critics’ insistence upon tension, paradox, ambiguity, and irony as principles of poetic energy.  As a means of reconciling these intimations of dualism, such words as “unification,” “identity,” and “fusion” have tended to come into use to express the complete metaphorical relation.  Yet these images – as far as they are images of oneness – do not satisfactorily describe the sensations, emotional and semantic, induced by even such a simple transposing m. as “He has burnt his boats at both ends”; nor do they give an appropriate indication of what happens in the last two stanzas of Sweeney among the Nightingales or  in Yeats’s The Second Coming.  It is conceivable that, if energy involves “tension” or bipolarity, m. like poetic experience exhibits an incorrigible dualism – or duplicity; and that although logical analysis can exhibit the vertiginous complexity of some metaphorical dualities, it can neither interpret them satisfactorily nor reduce them to monism except by radical distortion.  We may well be able to apprehend metaphorical relations without being able to translate them into logical or any other terms.

Ingenious analyses of m. have been conducted by reducing all m. to the predicative form “A is B” and tracing the nexus of logical relations involved in an identity of A and B; identity, not mere similarity, being postulated for the relation.  An interesting – and infinite – series of identifications, and identifications of identifications, then emerges.  Clearly, if A is B, then A is not not-B; and also, in some sense, B is A, and B is not not-A.  But beyond this, A is also not-B and B is not-A; otherwise the statement “A is B” or “B is A” would be tautological (“A is A” and “B is B”).  Thereby a complete set of contrary relations is established.  This procedure is capable of much more intricate and illuminating results than the repellant algebraic formulation would suggest; but it tends to preclude the controlled consideration of affective metaphorical context, and perhaps only comes into its own in analyzing the relations between symbols, myths, or archetypes.  It is certainly a good way of analyzing all the logical implications of a statement of the form “A is B” where identity of A and B is assumed; but it is unlikely to commend itself to those who regard m. as a nonlogical – even antilogical – mode of connection, and therefore as a relation that by definition is not expressed in the form “A is B.”

In an area so beset with the brambles of conflicting doctrine, some single view must be attempted.  As a general definition Stanford’s account serves very well.  Certain observations and suggestions may be added.  (The additional remarks accord – in some ways at least –with Martin Foss’s Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, but are not derived from that study.)  (1) M. is not simply a problem of language.  Though m. is seen in a highly developed form in poetry, and is the characteristic mode of energetic relation in poetry, it may also prove to be the radical mode in which we correlate all our knowledge and experience.  (2) M. is a nonpredicative energy-system, different from and opposite to (or complementary to) the logical mode.  The m. is to poetry what the proposition is to logic.  (3) When poetic energy is low the m. gravitates toward predication and simile – toward the “prosaic” m.  (4) M. can fall into a large number of different grammatical patterns.  Grammatical construction does not identify “essential” m., and is only a rough guide even to “prosaic” m.  The line of division between “essential” and “prosaic” occurs at about the level of simile (q.v.); but some passages in the simile-form achieve a genuine metaphorical relation, and some passages in the metaphor-form are submerged similes.  Also the analogical m. can be either “prosaic” or “essential”: cf.  “The chairman ploughed his way through the agenda” and “The ship ploughs the waves.”  (5) What Richards calls “interaction” may be called confrontation.  This would imply, on the analogy of human relationship, juxtaposition (parataxis) and interaction – even a desire to communicate, to enter into communion – without either the merging or unification of elements or the destruction of integral individuality.  (6) Although the verb “to be” is a primary mark of metaphorical coincidence or identity, the “prosaic” m. is usually (a) one in which immediacy of confrontation is destroyed by the verb “to be,” “to seem,” etc. (even when omitted), the space being bridged by the logical processes of comparison, descriptive emendation, and substitution (e.g., “to barter in the bawdy house of fame / their birthright for a misbegotten song”; the apparent m. “bawdyhouse of fame” = “fame is a bawdyhouse,” and anyway the whole m. is out of control); “When the play ended, they resumed / Reality’s topcoat”: the apparent m. “Reality’s topcoat” = “Reality is a topcoat.”  Again, “prosaic” m. is often (b) one in which the setting does not prepare and control confrontation.  (7) Metaphorical process may operate over a very limited or a very wide range.  The tendency of metaphorical energy to spread outward and to draw other elements inward may be called resonance.  (This at the logical level is what tradition meant by “consistency,” “congruity.”)  The resonance of a m. is a function both of the setting (which may be extensive) and of the nature of the elements brought into relation: for example, a m. which relates symbolic and mythical elements tends to be, but is not necessarily, more resonant than a m. which relates only elements which are dominantly visual or conceptual.  It would be profitable to see how resonance is affected by various parts of speech (verb, adjective, noun, etc.) and by sound and rhythm.  It would also be profitable to find out how there is metaphorical resonance in a phrase like Donne’s “a bracelet of bright haire about the bone,” and in passages where most of the elements are abstract terms and the syntactical relations apparently discursive (see for example Wordsworth, Immortality Ode 140-50, or Preface to The Excursion 62-71).  (8) “Essential” m. cannot be translated without severe cognitive loss, and is inexhaustible to analysis.  The only sure test is the actual relation in the individual instance, and the actual degree and scope of resonance.

The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, XI (Rhetoric, tr. W. Rhys Roberts; Poetics, tr. I. Bywater) (1924); M. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 ser. (1862, 1865); H. Paul, Principles of the Hist. of Language (1888); A. Biese, Die Philosophie des Metaphorischen (1893); P. Wegener, Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1898?); J. G. Jennings, An Essay on M. in Poetry (1915); H. Werner, Die Ursprünge der Metapher (1919); I. A. Richards, Principles; Coleridge on Imagination (1934), The Philos. of Rhetoric (1936); J, M. Murry, “M.” (1927) in Countries of the Mind, 2d ser. (1931); O. Barfield, Poetic Diction (1928); H. Konrad, Etude sur la métaphore (1939, 2d ed., 1958); H. W. Fowler, A Dict. of Modern Eng. Usage (1940; art. “M.” and “Simile & M.); Langer; M. Foss, Symbol and M. in Human Experience (1949); W. Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951); H. Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951); Crane, Critics; G. Whalley, Poetic Process (1953); P. Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (1954) and M. and Reality (1962); M. Black, “M.,” Proc. of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 55 (1955); Frye; C. Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of M. (1958); M. and Symbol, ed. L. C. Knights and B. Cottle (1960); M. I. Baym, “The Present State of the Study of M.,” BA, 35 (1961); C. M. Turbayne, The Myth of the M. (1962).