Comments on: Similes and the Moving Van of Metaphor

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:25:27 +0000

Er, “which both Clare and I” – what is it about this little box that makes us so typoprone? Excuse me: typo prone.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:22:04 +0000

First a correction: Ricks gets the phrase from Empson, with both Clare and I ought to have known! Ricks explains that the “self-inwoven simile… is a figure which both reconciles and opposes, in that it describes something both as itself and as something external to it which it could not possibly be.” (He’s talking about Marvell; see The Force of Poetry, p. 34)
Guinn Batten finds an example in Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes:
The rain comes flapping through the yard
like a tablecloth that she hand-embroidered.
My mother has left it on the line.
It is sodden with rain.
Empson’s own example was Shelley:
With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
Of elemental subtlety, like light,
etc.
“Poetry which idolises its object naturally gives it the attributes of deity, but to do it in this way is to destroy the simile, or make it incapable of its more serious functions,” says Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Shelley, he says, “seldom perceived profitable relations between two things.”
Thus.

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:21:00 +0000

Sorry to be dense… but do you think you could provide an example (or two), Don? I’m not sure I know what a self-interwoven simile would be… Or come to think of it, the TLS is probably in that pile of papers on the living room table somewhere.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:24:11 +0000

I’ve stumbled upon a more articulate way to express what I was saying about false similes, above. It’s from a review by Aingeal Clare (what a name!) in the December 7, 2007, Times Literary Supplement, in a review of Fiona Sampson. What I’ve been getting at is called by Christopher Ricks the “self-inwoven simile” – in Clare’s words, “whereby things (which are, by the way, ‘unalterably themselves’) are infused with poignancy by an over-indulgence of the reflexive verb. It is a kind of poetic tic, valuable because it presents a handy short cut to significance: but it can be rather addictive…”
As Clare remarks, one is a “much better writer” when one “ignores the lure of tacked-on importance.”
Back to your regularly scheduled thread about metaphor!

By: rachel hadas

rachel hadas — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:32:28 +0000

Rachel here again: SOOO interesting that Major J. (hi, Major) calls simile “a little brother,” since in my essay I refer to it as a younger sister.

By: rachel hadas

rachel hadas — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:06:13 +0000

Enjoying this spate of conversation about similes. Re that “cars nose forward liek fish” – take away the “like fish” and we have, I guess, a metaphor. More dynamic? more participatory, leaving us to do more of the work?
More years ago than I can stand to remember, I enjoyed this simile from LOLITA (describing one of the motels Humbert & Lolita visit): “a row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough.”
Many of Kay Ryan’s wonderful poems are metaphoric but actually work more like a Homeric simile, in that we enter a little story inside the figure, a story whose plot becomes the poem, but she avoids
“like” or “as” in setting up the figure.
Full disclosure and/or horn-tooting here: an essay of mine, “Similes,” is forthcoming in SOUTHWEST REVIEW in the spring. Its 3 diverse sources: 1) my experience listening to swatches of the Iliad read aloud a couple of years ago at one of the “The Readers of Homer” events; 2)
the invitation from The Academy of American poets (2 years back?) to quote and talk about a favorite line, and I chose Stevens’s “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation” and began to think about that; and 3) my husband’s dementia, which has given me lots of grist for the simile mill, though I notice doctors don’t by and large make use of the many eloquent similes lying around begging to be noticed.
In “The Changing Light at Sandover,” Mirabell the bat uses (M) to signal a metaphor, and JM picks this up, eg: “I used to be/Aware of (M) black holes in me…”
Thanks, Alicia! And thanks for mentioning me. Talking to you informs my thinking all the time.

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:51:32 +0000

Don, I'm glad you have faith in the simile! Thanks, Mary, for another inspiring example. Henry, I appreciate your anxiety, and know I can drift into the school-marmish... I did think it would be amiss not to include perhaps the best send up of similes on the books, and a favorite poem of mine, Ogden Nash's brilliant Very Like a Whale, a piece I am ever thankful for. To fully appreciate, it must be read aloud. Enjoy!

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:29:07 +0000

In sphagnum fields on the longest day
When dawn and dusk like frustrated lovers
Can kiss, legend has it, once a year.
Michael Longley in 11/19/07 New Yorker
from poem called Cloudberries

By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:04:27 +0000

I cf.d Celan, and can’t imagine him using a simile, but then again my German isn’t good enough to be sure.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:36:04 +0000

Forgive me, Alicia – no, I was just being ornery for Thanksgiving – I like to trouble & provoke the dusty moose-smeling urn of Beauty & Truth – and am actually Thankful for your edifying exposition here -
yet I’m of two minds – I worry about how Knowledge & Technique will Armor-Plate a complacent mandarin-professional poet-Caste – As when yon tyro Clerk, puffed-up with some safe-seeming Sinecure, exhaling pompous Jargon-Mysteries, lords it over the trod-down hoi-polloi. . .
& how true poetry transcends its own technique, surpasses itself. . . & how the Masters of the Art, by reading the best Readers of the Art, grow ever-more humble about their limitations. . .
& how Poetry is not Rhetoric nor Grammar, but something almost beyond Art itself, an anti-Art (cf. Celan).