3182 Metaphor

Monday, March 7, 2011

Plants are living things too - they're just easier to catch and you can’t hear them scream.

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Back in post 3178 Why I disliked poetry professors, I said I hated the way they made us analyze the meaning of a poem, as if anyone could really know what the author was thinking. Not only that, but the profs seemed to think that even though there could be many interpretations, theirs was the correct one.

Well, last weekend I went to a Mensa gathering, and was reminded of one I attended in Washington, I think, in the late '70s. One of the speakers was a semi-famous British poet, and one of the things he said was that he is pleased when people see one of his works as a metaphor for something that has meaning to them, but he hates when someone states that this is obviously what he meant. He gave an example. (I don't remember his name, and I don't remember the poem he used as his example, so I'll make one up that comes pretty close to his example.)

He was going through a period of depression, sort of writer's block. One morning he was sitting in the breakfast room, glanced out the window, and saw a patch of bright summer morning sun shining on the rose bushes, dark maroon bushes backed by white climbing roses trellised up the garden wall. The roses glowed, and he'd never seen them so beautiful. The sight made him feel so good, he wanted to capture the effect so that when he felt down, he could revisit it. So he wrote the poem, right there at the breakfast table.

Later he realized that the poem contained a lot of possible meanings, that it could be interpreted many ways. That's often what makes a good poem great. There was one interpretation that he didn't consider. Others saw the sky as representing Heaven, and the sun as God, the maroon roses as sinners and the white roses climbing up the wall toward Heaven as the virtuous, but that God's light and love shone on both alike. Very Victorian.

That interpretation didn't bother him - if people wanted to see it that way, that's ok, although he didn't because he is atheist. What really pissed him off was when people decided that he saw himself as one of the maroon roses, a sinner, and the poem represented his repudiation of atheism, that it was an epiphany for him. That became the accepted interpretation in academia no matter how much he denied it.

He almost whined, "I just wanted to remember the sun on the roses. That's all."

I think anyone other than the author who says, "This is what it means" without adding the "to me" is being incredibly arrogant.
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