Why does poet chose to write the poem - “No Such Thing”, in a conversation form? *
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You might also notice that within the overall metaphor of the tiger, there are other metaphors such as “burning bright.” “Burning bright” compares our metaphorical tiger to a fire.” But why is the tiger burning? When you read the poem, you will see that this tiger was made with a hammer and chain in a furnace. The metaphor makes a tiger the creation of a blacksmith (the blacksmith being a metaphor for God). This is not how “literal” tigers are made. Why has Blake chosen these metaphors? What effect do they have on our reading or understanding of the poem? Such questions can be answered—and they can be answered either well or poorly. But the answers will not be as simple or final in this poem as the answer to the question of the child/book figure in Bradstreet’s poem.
Still other metaphors may be impossible to pin down precisely. Both of the figures mentioned so far evoke emotion or feeling as well as meaning. But it is possible to take a figure so far into the emotional that it loses all sense of the intellectual meaning, as some claim T.S. Eliot does in this image from a poem not on our syllabus,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it as a soft October night,
Curled once around the house, and fell asleep.
It’s clear that the poet is comparing fog to a cat (this is an implied metaphor because the cat is invoked without ever being named). The “catness” of fog is however far less obvious than the fearful power of blacksmith/God is to a tiger or the mother to child relationship of an author for her book. Moreover, this fog-cat metaphor is stretched out to such an absurd length that it begins to lose sense. We learn very much less about fog by comparing it to a cat than we learn about books by comparing them to children or about God by comparing him to a blacksmith.
But the difficulties we may have with the cat-fog metaphor doesn’t mean that the poet has failed. In the context of the poem it is clear that the metaphor is meant to reveal more about the state of mind of the title character than about the catness of fog.
We’ve barely begun to discuss the intricacies of metaphor. But that will be enough for now. We could spend the whole book on the subject. Many books have been writing trying to understand all there is to understand about metaphor. We’ll go through the rest more quickly.
Simile. Simile is very much like a metaphor but it uses an explicit word, usually “like” or “as,” to compare one thing to another. So instead of saying “My book is my child,” You say, “My book is like a child.”
Metonymy and Synecdoche. Metonymy is the substitution of a name of an object closely associated with the word you have in mind for that word: “White House” for president. “Crown” for king. “The sweat of the brow” for “hard labor.”
Synecdoche is similar to metonymy; it is the substitution of a name of some part of a thing for the whole thing: You say “trunk” for tree in a sentence such as “We have fourteen trunks on our property,” or “wheels” for “car,” in the expression, “a nice set of wheels.” With synecdoche you can also do the opposite and choose a whole to name a part. You can call a police officer “the law,” for example, as in “The law is coming to give me a speeding ticket.”
Hyperbole. We mentioned this above. It is exaggeration. “This book weighs a ton.”
Litotes. This too we mentioned above: understatement. Of home run slugger Barry Bonds, “He’s not the weakest person who ever played the game.”
Irony: saying one thing but meaning another, generally the opposite. Saying of a beautiful painting, “Oh, isn’t that ugly.” In irony we perceive that the words deliberately fail to coincide with their usual meaning.
Apostrophe: An apostrophe we speak to an inanimate object or an absent person. “Western wind, when will thou blow?” I’m talking to the wind.
Symbol: The use of a verbal object or quality of an object to stand for an abstract idea. The black hats worn by bad guys in Westerns and the white hats worn by Good Guys are symbolic of evil and good.
Explanation: