Metaphor’s the soul of poetry: <br />this incongruous instrument of speech <br />with which we say one thing, <br />when we mean quite another: <br /> <br />I wish that Shakespeare, its greatest English user, <br />had coined a truly English word for it – <br />or perhaps, those blunt and foursquare Anglo-Saxons <br />who came before; their words as hand-hewn as are spades – <br /> <br />the word comes from the Greek, and means a transference; <br />‘My lord, your transference is apt and shrewd…’ <br />no, even that’s but transferred to a Latin stem, <br />‘carrying across’. Too late to seek some native word – <br />a ‘thoughtshift’ or a ‘mindmatch’ then? <br /> <br />We wear it down, and make it less <br />by thoughtless grabbing at the candy-jars <br />upon the shelves of sweetshops of our speech, <br />as if to mimic poetry that we haven't earned.. <br /> <br />but at its height, a metaphor shines like new light; <br />bringing together, two images so disparate <br />and making of their neighbouring, a moment magical in memory <br />as if we’d never seen the world so brilliant <br />or so revealing; moments when the mind’s a god, <br />and life itself a metaphor; a glimpse <br />that somewhere, two things mentioned meet <br />under the astonished, single gaze of eternity itself.. <br /> <br />Metaphor’s a holy sacrament: one should never dare <br />to use it without some faint echo, of a moment clear recalled <br />when that which one refers to, came dazzling bright into the mind <br />as life transfigured to another world, <br />time lifted to the timeless; <br />the radiance of the world’s first day, <br />Creation, in itself, one glorious godly metaphor.. <br />and nothing ever less than one.<br /><br />Michael Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/seeking-metaphor/
