Metaphor as discovery

Robert Frost, in his Amherst lecture "Education by Poetry" (delivered 1930, revised for the Amherst Graduates' Quarterly in February 1931), gave the most-quoted compressed definition of metaphor in twentieth-century poetics: thinking, he said, "is just putting this and that together, it is just saying one thing in terms of another." He was not making a small point. He went on to claim that "metaphor" was "the whole of thinking," and that the height of poetry "is the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter."

What is worth noticing — and what most secondary readings of the essay flatten — is that Frost is not describing metaphor as a literary device tucked into the toolkit. He is describing it as a way of finding out what you mean. The metaphor is not the wrapping the meaning arrives in; the metaphor is how the meaning was reached. Many poets find this distinction is the difference between a metaphor that works in a draft and a metaphor that does not.

The decorative reading, and what it gets wrong

A standard workshop reading treats metaphor as a stylistic option. The poet has a thing to say; the poet then chooses whether to say it plainly or via a comparison. On this reading, metaphor is dispensable — a flourish — and the poet's job is to make sure each one is "fresh" or "earned."

The reading is not wrong about the surface. Bad metaphors are decorative; they sit beside the meaning without changing it. But the reading misses what strong metaphors are doing. Consider Ada Limón's "How to Triumph Like a Girl," the opening poem of Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015). The poem watches a field of female racehorses — the "lady horses" — and ends with the speaker claiming a "huge beating genius machine" of a heart inside her "delicate skin." The poem is not saying "I am like a horse" as decoration on top of a separable claim. The horse is the means by which the speaker finds the claim she is making. Without the horse the line at the end — that big dark, dangerous animal I have inside me — has nothing to push against. The metaphor is the discovery.

This is what Frost meant. The metaphor finds the meaning. Strip out the horse and the speaker has nothing to triumph in.

Linguistics catches up

The reading Frost gave in 1930 became, fifty years later, the central claim of cognitive linguistics. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980; second edition with afterword, 2003) opens with the conceptual metaphor argument is war. We do not just talk about arguments using military terms ("attack a position," "defend a claim," "gain ground"); we structure the act of arguing by them. We treat our interlocutor as an opponent. The metaphor is not in the language alone. It is in how we think the activity.

The implication for poets is direct. A metaphor in a poem is not a label stuck on a thought. It is the conceptual scaffold the thought is built from. Change the metaphor and the thought changes. Argument is dance is not just a prettier way of saying argument is war; it would produce a different kind of argument, with different moves, different victories, different defeats. Many poets find that the strongest metaphors in their own drafts are the ones they could not have arrived at without writing the poem — the ones that surfaced something the poem did not know it was going to say.

Metaphor as the act of carrying

Ada Limón has noted, in interviews around her 2018 collection The Carrying (Milkweed Editions), that the word metaphor descends from the Greek metaphorá, "a carrying across." The etymology is not just a curiosity. It names what the strong metaphor actually does: it takes something from one domain (the racehorse, the wet bough in the metro, the kitchen vessel) and carries it across into another (the speaker's body, the human crowd, the marriage). The two domains do not collapse into each other. They stay distinct. What changes is that the second domain is now reachable in a way it was not before. The reader can stand in the speaker's body precisely because the horse is also there.

A metaphor that does not carry — that pairs two domains without producing a new way of standing in either — is the metaphor a draft is best edited around. A metaphor that carries — that opens a route the poem could not have walked without it — is usually the line the rest of the poem ends up answering to.

Extended metaphor as inquiry

The clearest case for metaphor-as-discovery is the extended metaphor that runs through a whole poem. Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" (written 1962, published in Ariel, 1965) builds its central comparison between the speaker's repeated near-deaths and the Nazi camps in a way that has been argued about ever since. Steven Gould Axelrod and other Plath scholars have read the metaphor as the means by which the poem reaches a recognition the speaker could not have reached more directly: that her body has become, in her own experience, a site of repeated atrocity and repeated public viewing. The metaphor is extreme. Some readers consider it overreach. The point for the craft argument is that the metaphor is doing the discovery — the recognition the poem ends with (Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air) would not be reachable without the inheritance the comparison summons. The editor's bias here is toward judging an extended metaphor by what it lets the poem find, not by whether it is decorative or "earned" in the abstract.

Mahmoud Darwish offers a quieter example. Darwish told the New York Times in 2001 that he saw Palestine as a metaphor "for the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and exile, for the declining power of the Arab world in its dealings with the West." The metaphor is doing geographic and historical work the bare political claim could not — it makes a particular loss available to readers who do not share the speaker's history. In "I Belong There" (translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, University of California Press, 2003), the speaker's lines on belonging — I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home — work because "home" has been built across the whole poem by the metaphor that surrounds it. Without the surround, the word does what its dictionary entry does; with the surround, the word is doing what the poem found out.

A working test

The following question seems to do work across the poems this essay engages with: what would the poem mean without the metaphor?

• If the answer is "approximately the same thing, minus a flourish," the metaphor is decorative. It may still be pleasant on the page; it is doing what abstraction could do faster.
• If the answer is "I cannot say what the poem would mean — the metaphor is the means by which the meaning is reached," the metaphor is load-bearing. This is the kind Frost named.
• If the answer is "the metaphor produces a meaning the poet did not seem to expect, and the rest of the poem is answering to it," the metaphor is doing discovery. Many poets find this is the metaphor most worth keeping.

The test is not pass/fail. Plenty of strong poems carry both decorative and discovery-bearing metaphors in the same draft. The editorial use of the test is to know which metaphor each one is, so the next revision pass can spend its attention where it counts.

A note on inheritance

A complication. Frost's reading and Lakoff's reading both assume that the poet is free to choose the metaphor. In devotional traditions, in elegy, in the ghazal — the field is partly given. Hafez, working in a tradition that inherits a particular set of figures (the cup, the rose, the friend, the tavern), is not choosing his metaphors the way Limón chooses hers. He is renewing inherited ones. The discovery in those poems is not "what new vehicle can I find?" but "what particular pressure can I put on the inherited vehicle so that it does work nobody else has made it do?" The editor's bias here is toward respecting both modes — the discovery that finds a new metaphor, and the discovery that finds a new use for an old one. Frost's claim survives either way: the meaning is reached through the metaphor, not laid on top of it.