Poetics: Metaphor and Metonymy

There are two key elements of poetics, figures of speech, that we encounter this week with Woolf’s (and Dillard’s) “Death of the Moth” and White’s “Once More to the Lake”. The moth is metaphor; the lake (and all the various things White describes connected to it, from fishhook to the soggy, icy garment at the end) is metonymy.  These poetic figures can also be thought of as rhetorical figures; they create imagery in the essays, but they also serve a larger, organizing purpose. The writers focus our attention almost entirely around them. Both metaphor and metonymy are symbolic figures: they substitute or replace one thing with another thing in some way related to it. With metaphor, the relation is one of resemblance: two things are physically different, but share some sort of similarity or resemblance. With metonymy, the relation is one of proximity or contiguity; two things are compared that are physically related, often a part of something that represents a larger part or whole. As elements of poetics, as well as rhetoric, these important figures of speech (and thinking) remind us that in nonfiction, in an essay, the writer can be creative and symbolic and still be nonfictional. You can, and do need to, “make” stuff up in an essay, and still represent the topic truthfully. Metaphor and metonymy play important, but different, roles in the symbolic action (remember Kenneth Burke’s definition) of all writing and thinking–not just in poetry.

Here are two further examples of metaphor and metonymy in action in writing. The examples are both from poetry, but the ways the figure of each works (the bird as metaphor for young writer/daughter in “The Writer”; the metonymy of the car/road and all its associations of travel, moving in “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road ”) applies to nonfiction writing as well, since the larger issue is how we conceive of the world in language. With metaphor, we tend to see and represent our world through resemblances and figures that substitute wholly for what we are thinking about–that are not directly related to thing we are thinking about; with metonymy, we tend to represent and see through the various parts and pieces of the world we are in, with things in some way related to what we are thinking. 

Here is the metonymy example:

“Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” by Lucinda Williams

sittin´ in the kitcken, a house in macon
loretta´s singing on the radio
smell of coffee, eggs, & bacon
car wheels on a gravel road
pull the curtains back & look outside
somebody somehere i do not know
c´mon now child we are going to go for a ride

car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road

can´t find a damn thing in this place
nothing is where i left it before
set of keys & a dusty suitcase
car wheels on a gravel road
There goes the screen door slamming shut
you better do what you are told
when i get back this room better be picked-up

car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road

low hum of voices in the front seat
stories nobody knows
got folks in jackson we are gonna meet
car wheels on a gravel road
cotton fields stretching miles & miles
hank´s voice on the radio
telephone poles trees & wires fly on by

car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road

broken down shacks engine parts
could tell a lie but my heart would know
listen to the dogs barkin in the yard
car wheels on a gravel road
child in the backseat about four or five yeahrs
lookin´ out the window
little bit of dirt mixed with tears

car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road
car wheels on a gravel road

Here is the metaphor example:

The Writer

by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden, My daughter is writing a story. I pause in the stairwell, hearing From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys Like a chain hauled over a gunwale. Young as she is, the stuff Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: I wish her a lucky passage. But now it is she who pauses, As if to reject my thought and its easy figure. A stillness greatens, in which The whole house seems to be thinking, And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor Of strokes, and again is silent. I remember the dazed starling Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago; How we stole in, lifted a sash And retreated, not to affright it; And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, We watched the sleek, wild, dark And iridescent creature Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove To the hard floor, or the desk-top, And wait then, humped and bloody, For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits Rose when, suddenly sure, It lifted off from a chair-back, Beating a smooth course for the right window And clearing the sill of the world.It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder.