Metaphor-to-Meaning Structure

The metaphor-to-meaning structure is a two-part structure that moves from supplying a metaphor for something (a thing, or a situation) to revealing the meaning of, the significance behind, that metaphor.

The use of such late revelation is strategic.  Like jokes and riddles, which of course do not give up their punch lines or solutions right away, some poems strategically employ the energy and the interest that can be garnered by creating and keeping alive suspense, by revealing what it in fact is “about” only at poem’s end.

The delayed revelation can also signify psychological pressure to try to repress the truth which is only revealed toward poem’s end, as occurs in “Fragments.”

“A noiseless, patient spider…,” by Walt Whitman

(Rae Armantrout’s “Dusk” is a funny, parody of Whitman’s poem, one that employs the ironic structure.  Check it out here.)

“Anchored to the Infinite,” by Edwin Markham

Markham’s poem is very similar to Whitman’s.

“Duck / Rabbit,” by Billy Collins

(Take a look at a duck/rabbit here.)

“Violin,” by Joanne Diaz

“Fragments,” by Stephen Dobyns

You can find an excellent discussion of Dobyns’s poem in “The Flexible Lyric” in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Flexible Lyric (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1999), pp. 162-67).

“The Silken Tent,” by Robert Frost

A big part of the constructed loveliness of “The Silken Tent” is that there’s almost no overt turning in it–but there is some subtle turning.  The “meaning” of ”The Silken Tent”’s gorgeously constructed and maintained metaphor is offered in line 7: the tent “signifies the sureness of the soul.”  And, of course, at the end of the sonnet, in the final couplet, where one expects the big movement of the turn, there is at least the hint of some movement.  “The Silken Tent” contains structure, but it also is a model of the use of understatement.

“The Envoy,” by Jane Hirshfield

There seem to be two kinds of meanings provided in “The Envoy”: both the revelation of the meaning of the metaphor and a larger statement of the meaning of the poem: metaphor, meaning, and all.  (That is, this poem may employ a hybrid structure that combines the metaphor-to-meaning structure with a similar structure: the story-with-a-moral structure.)

“Part of Eve’s Discussion,” by Marie Howe

Howe’s is a mysterious poem.  See what she says about it here.

“On the First Tee with Charles Wright,” by Jon Loomis (in The Pleasure Principle (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 2001): 18).

“A Fixed Idea,” by Amy Lowell

“Not Swans,” by Susan Ludvigson

Ludvigson’s poem is perhaps a “symbol-to-intimation” poem…

“Ephemeroptera,” by Bill Morgan

“This is the Latest,” by Ange Mlinko

“Hospital Barge at Cerisy,” by Wilfred Owen

“Organized Religion,” by Frederick Seidel (in Ooga-Booga (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006): 67-68).

“Waterfall,” by Greg Williamson

And here are some poems in which ”poetry” (or “the poet”) specifically supplies the metaphor’s ultimate meaning:

“The Albatross,” by Charles Baudelaire

“The Bear,” by Galway Kinnell

Some poems reverse the metaphor-to-meaning structure, supplying the meaning first and then developing the metaphor.  Here are a few examples:

“Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk–,” by Jane Hirshfield (in Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2001): 24.)

“Thinking,” by Jorie Graham (in The Errancy (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1997): 40-1).  (In “Thinking,” the title serves as the meaning–the poem offers the metaphor.)

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” by John Keats

“On the Sale by Auction of Keats’s Love Letters,” by Oscar Wilde

In “Securitization,” Ange Mlinko employs the metaphor-to-meaning structure in the poem’s first part.

And if you take out the final six lines of Yvor Winters’s “Before Disaster” (as John Ciardi recommends in the final chapter of his book How Does a Poem Mean?), his poem becomes another which employs the metaphor-to-meaning structure.

“The Riddle of the Sphinx Moth,” by Sarah Hannah  A metaphor-to-meaning poem that (ironically, and poignantly) questions its own operation.

“Handle,” by J. Allyn Rosser  A poem which clearly starts as a metaphor-to-meaning poem (beginning, “Like the handle…”), but, at the turn, instead of confidently stating its meaning, the poem instead enacts its own inability to “handle” its materials, delivering an avalanche of thoughts.

“Sheep’s Cheese,” by Jane Hirshfield  In its penultimate line, this poem denies that it is trying to make a metaphor out of the poem’s materials (“The wheels are only sheep’s milk, not ripening souls”).  But the suggestion is enough–yes?–to animate (to give anima–spirit, or soul–to) the inanimate.