Imagery

All language is metaphorical. Those afflicted by misfortune do not literally “reel under a grievous blow”, “dust themselves down” or “stagger valiantly on their way”. It is true that nowadays we use the word “literally” nonliterally, as in “I literally fell through the floor in astonishment”.

The word has become what is technically known as an intensifier, intended to underline a point. The same goes for the publican who chalks “real” ale on his blackboard – he sees the quotation marks as a form of italics. “Real” ale means really real, not just conceivably so.

Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, chiasmus and so on are the warp and woof of everyday life. To speak of “the Crown” is to deploy synecdoche, using a part to stand for a whole. The same goes for “all hands on deck”. The history of thought is the history of its models and metaphors. We can, for example, see the world as “God’s body”, a “piece of mechanism”, a “mighty organism”, an “unfathomable text” or a “veil of illusion”.

The self is an “immortal soul”, a “blob on the pineal gland”, a “ghost in a machine”, a “process that can never grasp itself”, a “state of the brain”. To find the right image – a “double helix”, say, rather than an “inverted triangle” – is to coax the world into revealing itself.

Milan Kundera writes, in his novel Immortality, that to grasp the unique nature of a person is a matter of finding the right metaphor for him, such as “he’s a frustrated baby who wants to throw the whole world away”.

When we want an account of someone we don’t know, we say “What’s she like?” Knowledge works in terms of similes. And similes, interestingly, are literal. There is nothing figurative in claiming that your boyfriend looks like a toad, as opposed to claiming that he is a toad.

There is a paradox here. To describe one thing, we have to resort to another. Perversely, the dictionary tells us the meaning of one word by supplying us with lots of other words, and to look these up is to find even more words. In language, as in flirting, one thing leads to another.

Moreover, none of these words is unique to what it describes. To say that she is “a conceited little prig” is to use a term that could be applied to millions of men and women. We can capture the pure essence of a thing only by using signs that come to us shop soiled and tarnished, like coins thumbed by countless anonymous others. “'I love you” is always a quotation. Indeed, it is one of the hoariest old quotations in the world, however burningly sincere you may be when you murmur it. All language is ineluctably general, and could not work if it wasn’t.

Poets, however, are not happy with this state of affairs. They work to make their language seem utterly peculiar to what it portrays. It is as though, if you were to alter a single sound or lilt of the line “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass”, from Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, you would end up with a different perception altogether.

There is a sleight of hand at work here. Poets are the con-artists of language. They make us believe for a bewitching moment that only this set of words could possibly stand for this set of things – if this were actually true, language would come grinding to a halt. The word “image” suggests the visual, but not all imagery is of this kind.

When W. H. Auden writes of patients in a hospital ward that they “lie apart like epochs from each other”, part of the force of the image is that it defeats visualisation. The same goes for his line “Anxiety receives them like a Grand Hotel”, which similarly yokes together the concrete and the abstract.

In one sense no similes can be visualised: to think of jealousy as “a green-eyed monster” is to think of a green-eyed monster, not of jealousy incarnate. When Robert Burns tells us that his love is “like a red, red rose”, what image leaps to mind? A woman with petals and a thorn?

And when T. S. Eliot writes in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock of the evening looking “like a patient etherised on a table”, he is not inviting us to visualise anything. If anything, he is drawing attention to the way in which this simile can’t be grasped by the mind’s eye – to the way that it is really just a piece of language that mischievously tempts us to construct an impossible “mental picture” of it. Eliot is not giving us an image. He is telling us something about the snares and illusions of imagery. And that goes for the art of poetry as a whole.

Why, finally, does poetry matter? One could do worse than reply, because it is completely useless. Like all art, it is a scandal to a world governed by grim utility, in which anything that lacks an instant cash value is bound to be worthless. Like human beings, poetry is entirely pointless – and in this, precisely, lies its point.

How to Read a Poem is published by Blackwell (£9.99, offer £9.49 inc p&p from 0870 1608080)

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