9 May 2017
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson:
Metaphor and its Philosophical Mysteries
Professor Belinda Jack
This is my last lecture – the twenty-fourth - as Gresham Professor of Rhetoric. It has been a great privilege to hold this position and I have found the college and ‘my’ public (if I can put it that way) to be immensely loyal, interesting and encouraging. So my thanks to you – and to everyone who works at Gresham, particularly the Provost, Sir Richard Evans and Dr Valerie Shrimplin, the Academic Registrar.
We’ve been listening to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 ('Jupiter') in C major. Dickinson was a great lover of music, Mozart’s in particular.
In my first three years, my lectures were on ‘The Mysteries of Reading and Writing’. Reading is a complex activity and its history is remarkable. I also wanted to emphasise genres and to consider how writers explore different areas of human experience in ways which are intimately associated with the genre in which they choose to write whether it be poetry, drama, or the novel. As readers we engage very differently with different genres.
This year my overall title has been ‘Rhetoric and Life of Literature’. I’ve explored various rhetorical tropes – or figures of speech – in relation to a number of major and favourite authors.
Rhetoric makes sense of how we use language, how we communicate successfully and persuasively. Figures of speech – personification, irony, simile, metaphor and so on describe the workings of language and explain – to some extent – how creative language, creative writing, has its effect on us – how it moves us, seduces us, enlightens us and so on. But it has its limits. Or rather, in the hands of great writers the rhetorical trope, the figure of speech, is used in ways which are no wholly and completely consonant with the trope’s definition. Creative writers tweak the figure of speech; they use it subversively; they exploit its ambiguities and creativities. Recognising rhetorical tropes helps us to identify how literary works make their effects. But they have their limitations.
Tonight I have chosen to explore perhaps the most problematic of all rhetorical terms – metaphor. It’s a figure of speech that has long troubled anyone who has made the mistake of thinking about it too much! It is conventional to speak of a metaphor’s ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, as I mentioned in my last lecture on simile. The ‘vehicle’ generally assists us in understanding the nature of the ‘tenor’. I’ll give an example in a moment.
Analytical philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and literary critics, have all written about metaphor and even within each of these intellectual disciplines there is little or no consensus as to what it is, exactly.
The etymology of the word is relatively straightforward. It comes from the Greek, via Latin – ‘to bear or carry across’. As a linguistic and literary term, metaphoradenotes the transfer of a word to a new sense, and, in particular, the transfer of a name from an object where its use is commonplace to an object where it is unusual. The same term is used for both the process of transference and the name transferred.
An anonymous poem used to be used as a pedagogical tool when explaining metaphor:
The steed bit his master
How came this to pass?
He heard the good pastor
Cry, “All flesh is grass.”
‘Flesh’ is the tenor, ‘grass’ is the vehicle.
So metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable – here flesh and grass.
So why do we need metaphor, and why is metaphor so common in our use of language, poetic language in particular?
In a famous passage from hisPhilosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein explores a limitation of language:
‘Describe the aroma of coffee. Why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? Andfor whatare words lacking? But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma of coffee and not succeeded?’
Wittgenstein never wrote an extended treatise on metaphor but he uses metaphor to great effect in his writings. For example, in his 1921 work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he states that although his propositions are at some
level incorrect, they can nevertheless be used like steps on aladderto help one reach a higher level of understanding.
He also observed that words have what he called ‘rough edges’. Even what we consider to be ‘literal’ language is rarely straightforward. He believed in the reliability of metaphor as a vehicle for truth, despite the inevitability of certain ‘raggedness’ along the edges of words. And one way in which he tried to sand the edges of words, so to speak, was by means of language games. And these are akin, it seems to me, to Emily Dickinson’s riddles which I’ll come to in a moment.
Metaphor has various sub-categories.
Take ‘mixed metaphor’. I remember my sons, when quite young, insisting that the dining table could be moved into a larger room for the purposes of table tennis. I rather doubted that the table would fit through the door but was carried along by their enthusiasm. They managed to get the table stuck – well and truly – in the door frame and I remember Jamie declaring, ‘now we’re really up a gum tree – without a paddle’!
There is a wonderful comic absurdity about mixed metaphors.
Then there is ‘dead metaphor’. What do we mean by it?
Adead metaphoris afigure of speechwhich has lost its original meaning (or imagery), due to over-use. Because deadmetaphorshave a conventional meaning which is distinct from the original, they can be understood without knowing their earlier meaning and connotations. Dead metaphors are generally the result of achange in the evolution of a language,sometimes called the literalization of metaphor.Linguists sometimes distinguish between dead metaphors whose origins are unknown to most users (like the idiom ‘tokick the bucket’), and those whose source is widely known or whose symbolism is easily understood even if it isn’t often considered, the idea of ‘falling in love’, for example.
There is some debate among scholars as to whether so-called ‘dead metaphors’ are dead or are metaphors. R.W. Gibbs noted that for a metaphor to be dead, it would necessarily have lost the metaphorical meaning(s) that it comprises. These qualities, however, still remain. A person can understand the expression ‘falling head-over-heels in love’ even if they have never encountered that particular version of the common phrase ‘to fall in love’. The British-American analytic philosopher,Max Black, argued that the dead metaphor should not be considered a metaphor at all, but rather classified as a separate item of vocabulary.
So a dead metaphor is one in which the sense of a transferred image no longer strikes us. It is closely related to cliché where, again, the meaning of the constituent words passes us by.
Here are some examples: ‘to grasp a concept’; ‘to gather what you've understood’. These expressions use a physical action – ‘grasp’, ‘gather’ - as a metaphor for understanding. The listener or reader doesn’t need to visualize the action; we tend not to be aware of dead metaphors.
C.S.Lewis worried about the hi-jacking of words with specific and important meanings to express approval or disapproval. It’s a linguistic trend that shows no signs of abating. I’m thinking of ‘wicked’, ‘evil’, ‘awesome’, ‘epic’, and so on.
Metaphor is as old as language itself. Metaphors occur in the Epic of Gilgamesh, often regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature (written c.2150-1400 BCE).
It’s a vast, complex and fascinating subject. Some think it so various and unstable that there is no point thinking about it at all. And this is rather my position!
Because in the work of a poet like Emily Dickinson, metaphor reaches an absolute limit, even a breaking point. So this evening we’ll be reading some of Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poems with particular attention to what we might, at least at first sight, call metaphor.
Dickinson led a famously reclusive life – although not as reclusive as the Dickinson myth suggests. But her biography is – it is true – relatively devoid of movement and event in the literal, physical sense. She was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. [1] ] It was an academic, agricultural, and manufacturing town.
She attended Amherst Academy from 1840-1847. [2] The school lacked resources. During Dickinson’s years at the school, most of the teachers and even the heads were recent graduates of Amherst College or various female seminaries, and in general they taught for a year or less. But they were young and intellectually keen, and Dickinson wrote of them with warmth.
For a year she was a pupil at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley. [3,4] She then returned home and stayed at home for virtually her whole life. And there were few visitors. But the small number of people whom she did meet were a huge influence on her poetry. The Reverend Charles Wadsworth, [5] whom she met on a rare trip - to Philadelphia - was a particular source of inspiration. In 1860, after he had visited Dickinson at home, on his way to the West Coast, she composed a number of poems which describe feelings of lost love. While it is clear that he was a key figure in her life, it’s uncertain as to whether their relationship was a romantic one.
By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total isolation from everyone barring her family. But given her extensive reading and frequent correspondence with a wide circle of friends, she was far from cut off intellectually. Her social contact was with her immediate - and extended – family. Conversations were varied and lively. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was involved in both local and national politics, and served for a term in Congress. Equally important to her were her brother, Austin, and his wife, Susan Gilbert. Austin had studied law and became an attorney. Lavinia, Dickinson’s younger sister, also lived at home throughout her life. Both siblings were important to Dickinson not just emotionally, but intellectually too.
Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets and by the Bible and Shakespeare. In fact she believed that to be a poet in the English language all that really mattered was a thorough knowledge of the King James Bible and Shakespeare which gives us hope for those cast away on Desert Island Discs!
The other significant influences on her poetry were those associated with an upbringing in a Puritan New England town where a Calvinist, orthodox and highly conservative approach to Christianity was promulgated.
She admired the poetry ofRobertandElizabeth Barrett Browning, as well asJohn Keats and although she was dissuaded from reading the poetry of her contemporaryWalt Whitman[6] – it was considered ‘disgraceful’ - the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the co-founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not, unlike Whitman, publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886. [7]
And it was only after her death that her family discovered the extent of her writings. They found forty hand bound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or ‘fascicles’[8,9] as they are sometimes called. Dickinson had made these little booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of paper and copying what are assumed to be the final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical) and an unconventional use of capital letters. The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her unusual and varied punctuation, replacing them with traditional punctuation. The original order of the poems wasn’t re-established until 1981. The Dickinson scholar Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper to work out the original order using smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues. But since then, some critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in the original small collections. Reading the poems chronologically may not have been what Dickinson would have wanted.
So now to the poetry – and how metaphor is exploited – or subverted.
Dickinson’s subjects – in so far as the poems can be said to have a ‘subject’ are relatively conventional – love, loss, death, eroticism, nature – its beauty, its mysteries – fear, pain, faith or faithlessness, the workings of the mind, and above all, language itself. But if these subjects are conventional, her tone is much less so – irreverent, flirtatious, witty, violent, philosophical, teasing, tragic, disturbing; the list could include as many adjectives as the number of poems she wrote.
Dickinson didn’t give her poems titles, no doubt because a title prejudices, in some sense, how the poem will be understood. As I mentioned earlier there is often something of the riddle about her poems (not unlike Wittgenstein’s word games) and a title would give the riddle away. So let’s start with ‘The Lightning is a yellow fork’ of 1867.[10,11]
The Lightning is a yellow Fork
From Tables in the sky
By inadvertent fingers dropt
The awful Cutlery
Of mansions never quite disclosed
And never quite concealed
The Apparatus of the Dark
To ignorance revealed.
‘The Lightning is a yellow fork’; syntactically this might be metaphor. We don’t read that the lightning is like a yellow fork – this would be simile; rather the lightning is a yellow fork.
But we speak of ‘forked lightning’; this is dead metaphor – at best - as the expression has come into the language, like a ‘fork’ in the road, or a ‘forked tongue’.
Lightning and fork can, therefore, be regarded as synonymous – but only temporarily. So this isn’t really metaphor. It is a form of repetition. The subsequent lines, however, require us to re-consider. The ‘Fork’ has been ‘dropt’ from a table and is then re-described as ‘Cutlery’.