Frost suggested that poetry is talking about one thing to tell about another.
Constucting a metaphor, the poet presents the similarity (or -ies, extending the metaphor), dancing with the difference, by saying that one thing is another (A is B, while it's also not). “Old age is / a cheaping of small birds” and then Williams extends the bird image in such a way as to provide multiple features of old age, and offer an interpretation and evaluation of it. Use of “is” to draw an identification of two very different, named things is one way of doing it. Williams tells us some things about old age by talking about small birds in harsh winter.
I might say to a friend, “Man, old age sucks,’ and he’d say, “small birds in harsh winter.” He’d be using a metaphor (by way of allusion), with both things named but no use of “is,” and I think I’d get some of it even if I hadn’t read the poem. We both having read the poem, he’d be reminding me of a lot, a multidimensional perspective on my just complaint. (I value that poem much more fully than I once did.)
One “is” metaphor that is a personal favorite of mine is Stevens's "The Glass of Water," that is simultaneously a weedy pond. Suddenly: "Light is the lion that comes down to drink." Whoa. That's a great moment, every time. I never get over it. (Same with Dickinson’s “And he unrolled his feathers, And rowed him softer home.”) In our minds we see the animal approach, and our body senses the lion’s weight, it’s muscles, bones, joints as it makes its way. Animating the verbal place, moment, my imagination, Stevens pulls from the hat the kingly beast that, as he says in another poem, about poetry, "can kill a man." "Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws, / When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws;" and in that act Stevens walks the beast around the ring of our delight in the vital energy of being. I believe that Stevens was right when he suggested that a metaphor changes one's imagination of life, and in a way that enriches one's world.
Dickinson’s poem begins by evoking a plain thing, in a way that causes us to take it literally (as literally as we can, when we know we are experiencing a work of art): “A bird came down the walk.” D then introduces an observing human consciousness, one who is not in the consciousness of the bird: “He did not know I saw.” The human voice then reports further facts, in a spirit of playfulness (i.e. setting us up, in child-like pleasure, for the intense delight of the deliteralizing imagination in her metaphor): “He bit an angle worm in half, / And ate the fellow, raw.”
Then in the conjoining of human and avion consciousness, as the speaker makes an offering of a crumb, the bird continues to act literally, by fleeing; but in the human consciousness, for the speaker and for the reader because of D’s act of verbal imagination, the bird’s flight (physically: flight—which we can’t do, rhythmic movement of wings, rapid distancing) provokes a nonsensory “thought” (holistically fusing sensory experience with intuition, emotion, reason—an act of imagination, in the Coleridgian sense), of a kind that takes us out of ourselves, out of normal literalizing consciousness and out of thing perceived as merely one-dimensional, momentary matter, and into a larger perspective, of a more Taoist sense of multi-dimensional, inter-relating, ongoing energy and energy source, which is the ultimate resting place or repository of individual moments of matter, e.g. ourselves.
Dickinson does that by using word-things that inter-relate different phenomena by seeing their similarities, working simultaneously with there differences, and evoking them imaginatively as identicals. I.e she uses metaphor. That’s hard to accomplish, especially with such power, and I don’t think she was able to do it because she had read analyses of what a metaphor is, and could therefore make one. She could do it, I suspect, because her mind perceived life that way, more than most minds do. Something physical about her brain? And, too, she reinforces the metaphor with word choice (e.g. “unrolled”), and rhythm.
But of course that take-off into metaphor, powerful as it is, launches us into a series of metaphors that carry us farther and farther into the nearly ineffable. Of course the consciousness that she gives us, as we are reading the poem, is not an ineffable experience, although it is illogical, translogical, transanalytical, meta-phorical, carrying us across; but it might make us believe that people do have ineffable experiences—experiences, furthermore, that seem revelatory of a very large scope of being, of which we are minor parts.
"If thou be'st born to strange sights, / Things invisible to see" (Donne), then metaphor is your chance to enjoy, because it shows you the world as you have not seen it. For some writers and readers it even shows a transcendent dimension of being.
Another of my personal favorites is James Wright's "Milkweed"--that same magic, but with very different emotion (and voice).
Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press