Language and Metaphor

I want to talk about metaphors. They’re everywhere and indispensable to thinking or saying or writing about anything. There are many theories of metaphor, but I want to seize on one. According to this theory, metaphors are initially created by poetry. Owen Barfield thought that it was poetry which was responsible for the creation of new metaphors. Now, why would we want to create new metaphors? Well, metaphors are the chief birthplace of meaning. Just as Socrates called himself a midwife for knowledge and ideas, poets are midwives for meaning.

It is the job of the poets (or those blessed with a cutting edge imagination) to probe for pristine metaphors. When this happens, new meaning is breathed into an idea or a word, and language is refined. To Barfield, what makes poetry (or prose verging on the poetic) distinct from prose is the metaphors it uses. Poetry (or, good poetry) will be using live metaphors (and striving after new ones), and prose will be using dead metaphors. Ordinary prose, in the opinion of Barfield, is a sea of dead metaphors which were once alive.

We might see the point better if we looked at an example. In a certain poem, Wordsworth called a woman a red, red rose. Not just a red rose: but a red, red one. In prose, the words are meant to denote, to point to an object out there. In this case, that is impossible because a rose is not a woman and a woman is not a rose. That is why it is a metaphor. But if it doesn’t denote, how is it meaningful? It is still meaningful because it was never meant to point to an object. If it is meant to point at anything, it is meant to point at meaning, and we can’t talk about a metaphor doing that without being metaphorical again.

The role of the metaphor is to appeal to your imagination. When you imagine a red, red rose, what do you think of, what associations arise? A rose is beautiful. A rose is full of life. In grasping a rose you risk getting pricked. The rose has been a symbol for secrecy (Rome), for love. The color red has been a symbol for guilt, pain, passion. And you can plumb the depths as far as you want. What associations arise with beauty, life, secrecy, love: the tree keeps branching out. No matter when your adventure ends, your understanding of a woman (or, at least the woman Wordsworth had in mind) snowballs.

We can do the same thing in any metaphor (or, similes). We can meet a true genius in Homer and feed off his metaphors for a lifetime: “He fell upon them like flames of fire from every quarter. As when a wave, raised mountain high by wind and storm, breaks over a ship and covers it deep in foam, the fierce winds roar against the mast, the hearts of the sailors fail them for fear, and they are saved but by a very little from destruction--even so were the hearts of the Achaeans fainting within them. Or as a savage lion attacking a herd of cows while they are feeding by thousands in the low-lying meadows by some wide-watered shore--the herdsman is at his wit's end how to protect his herd and keeps going about now in the van and now in the rear of his cattle, while the lion springs into the thick of them and fastens on a cow so that they all tremble for fear--even so were the Achaeans utterly panic-stricken by Hector and father Jove.”

Knowing that this is the office of metaphors can mushroom your appreciation of Scripture. Dead-ends in proper exegesis happen when we mistake the metaphors for ordinary prose, and so mistake appeals to our imagination to probe for more and more meaning with appeals to look at whatever object we thought the word was denoting, or pointing at. The Psalmist, instead of telling us that Nature worships God, tells us that the trees clap for joy. Instead of telling us that God is holy and just, the writer of Hebrews tells us that God is a consuming fire. He is the father of lights, a shepherd, a gate, a vine, a father, a husband, a son, a rock, a refuge, a fortress, a hiding place. Hell is darkness, an unquenchable fire. Heaven is bespangled with gold, other precious medals, gems, pearls, emeralds, gates, foundations, and so on. Jude on godless men: “They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.”

Metaphor is at the root of all language. The remarkable philosopher Wittgenstein was guided by it when he changed the climate of philosophy: twice. At the beginning, his blueprint was that of a picture, and just as a picture represents the pictured, so language represents the world. Feeling dissatisfied with that, he exchanged the metaphor of a picture with that of a tool: words aren’t any longer things that represent, but things we use - learning a language becomes learning how to do and fix things with words. At first, the meaning of a word is found in what it denotes; then, the meaning of a word is found in how it is used in a particular language-game.

Lets try to look at the most prosaic sentence we can think of. Say: the book is on the table. Is that metaphorical? It’s used literally, but it contains dead metaphors. The word ‘book’ comes from the Old English ‘boc’, meaning to document or charter! This leads us to the realm of documenting and chartering. ‘Charter’ (related to sailing out on a voyage) comes from the Latin ‘charta’, meaning ‘paper’. And ‘paper’ comes from the Latin ‘papyrus’, which means ‘paper-reed’. And what is a reed?: a plant, tall and slender. Do you see how buried beneath the word ‘book’, we discover its lineage, and how 'book' itself is a distant metaphor, a dead one.

Or, let’s look at: The animal is sleeping. That seems literal enough. The animal denotes an object (as did the book), but the word ‘animal’ comes from the Latin ‘animalis’, meaning ‘having breath’: another metaphor! And ‘sleep’ comes from the Old English ‘slaepan’, meaning ‘to be weak’. ‘Weak’ comes from the Old Norse ‘wikanan’, meaning ‘to bend’. It’s amazing! It’s everywhere. As C.S. Lewis explains: “It is a serious mistake to think metaphor is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as decoration and plain speakers can do without.”

There is much more to this subject, but I’ll stop here and write more on it later.