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On Interpretation
Workshop on figurative language
Valerie Bystrom and Thad Curtz


Form small groups (3 or 4). Take out paper and pencil.

Part 1. (10 minutes)

First, let's review Wimsatt's claim from "The Concrete Universal" (in The Verbal Icon, University of Kentucky, 1954, p. 79) about how metaphors work, in terms of a structure made from the vehicle, the tenor, and what he calls "the more general third class" defined by their resemblance, "a new conception for which there is no other expression". Here is a simple metaphor:

My love is a red rose.

Fill in the little table below, indicating the vehicle and the tenor, and then make some notes on the new conception defined by their resemblance. (According to Wimsatt, these will only be a way of approximating or gradually approaching this new meaning. As you may remember, he says, "It is of course impossible to tell all about a poem in other words... The situation is something like this: In each poem there is something (an individual intuition - or a concept) which can never be expressed in other terms. It is like the square root of two or like pi, which cannot be expressed by rational numbers, but only as their limit. Criticism of poetry is like 1.414... or 3.1416, not all it would be, yet all that can be had and very useful.")

Tenor             Vehicle           Notes on Resemblance                                                              


Part 2. (20 minutes)

Here's a more complicated example, from Shakespeare's Sonnet .

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

(One meaning of "choirs", here, is "the part of a church where the choir sings") There are several metaphors in these four lines. start with the one that uses "me" as the tenor, and diagram it in the same way.
Tenor             Vehicle           Notes on Resemblance                                                              

Now do the one that has "boughs" as the tenor.
Tenor             Vehicle           Notes on Resemblance                                                              


We'll get together at this point discuss any questions you have about metaphor. (If your group has any extra time, use it to try to work out how the other fighurative language in this passage functions.)


3. On Similes

A. Consider this simile and analyze it as you would a metaphor:

Her lips are as red as roses.
Tenor             Vehicle           Notes on Resemblance                                                              


B. The textbook definition of a simile ("a comparison using `as' or `like'") unfortunately just focuses on the surface structure of the phrase, since in fact there is a range of possibility in how such comparisons function to generate meaning. Consider:

She sings like a lark.

My love is like a red, red rose.

In terms of how the actual structure of meaning works, are these closer to the simile in section 3A or to the metaphor in section 1? Does one of them work more like Wimsatt's sample of a concrete universal than the other? If so, which one is closer and why?


4. On Symbols

Now, consider how the rose and lily work in this passage, where they function as symbols:

I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.

William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason, l. 577-80


Analyze this structure as you would a metaphor.
Tenor             Vehicle           Notes on Resemblance                                                              


How does this work differently from the rose in #1? (In particular, how does the relation between the person speaking and the complex of meaning we're interested in different in these two cases? What difference might that difference make?)

Let's hear what you came up with.

5.

Get out your copies of the Bowles and Coleridge sonnets. Have one person in the group read "To the River Itchin." Together, consider: who is the speaker? Where is he? What prompts this poem? How does the sonnet develop? Are there any metaphors? How do they work?
Tenors            Vehicles           Notes on Resemblances                                                             



Have another person read "To the River Otter." Together, consider who is the speaker? Where is he? What prompts this poem? How does the sonnet develop? How does the metaphoric content work? Any similarities to the Wordsworth sonnet we studied on Friday?
Tenor             Vehicle           Notes on Resemblance                                                              

Group discussion ...

6. Homework - After you read "The Solitary Reaper" for Friday's seminar, see what you can figure out on your own or with somebody else about how the figurative language in it works. Then study the paragraph of Wimsatt's article on page 80 in which he discusses this poem as another, more complicated example, of how poetry creates a "concrete universal". Try to get clear enough about his analysis so you are capable of explaining it to somebody else before seminar on Friday.