New Yorker magazine publishes new poems in each issue. I like them, but I often wonder how much the poems are appreciated by the majority of the magazine’s readers. Poems are usually somewhat nonliteral and sort of artsy, aren’t they? And many people say they “don’t understand” poetry.
When I was still in the classroom, I loved teaching literature, and especially poetry, because it gave me an opportunity to help kids become familiar with the artistic use of words.
Figurative language — figures of speech — are the word artist’s tools for creating wonderfully clear images with words. They’re like the painter’s color palette; they provide the shades and nuances that make the piece of art attractive.
I’m going into teacher mode here, so please excuse a few pedantic moments! A “figure of speech” is a rhetorical device that helps a writer achieve a special effect by using words in distinctive ways. There are hundreds of different kinds of figures of speech, but don’t get nervous, I’m not about to try to explain or use all of them here. And there won’t be a quiz at the end, either.
You might remember something about figurative language (or figures of speech) from your high school literature classes because figurative language is often associated with literature and with poetry in particular. Truthfully, though, whether you’re conscious of it or not, you use figures of speech every day in our own writing and conversations.
For instance, common expressions such as “racking my brain,” “hitting the bullseye” and “falling in love” are all metaphors, the most common figure of all.
We also use a lot of similes in our everyday speech and writing. We rely on similes when we want to make explicit comparisons (“sharp as a tack,” “filthy as a pig”).
And we often use hyperbole (exaggeration) to emphasize a point (“I could eat a horse!”).
We also use an awful lot of onomatopoeia, words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to: words like buzz, splat, bang, boom, crunch. Think about the words that were often splashed on the screen on the old “Batman” TV show!
Personification is another great tool. It’s the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something that’s nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form. An example of the use of figures of speech: you know how often we use the term “a dust of snow”? Do you know where that expression came from? Robert Frost wrote a little eight-line poem called “Dust of Snow”:
“The way a crow/Shook down on me/The dust of snow/From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart/A change of mood/And saved some part/Of a day I had rued.”
And ever since, we use that wonderful little metaphor about a dust of snow. Isn’t that a neat word picture? I think every time we use it, we should give Robert Frost a nickel!
One more example: Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a lovely little poem called “The Buck in the Snow.”
“White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,/Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe/Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,/Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,/Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow./
Now he lies here, his wild blood scalding the snow.
How strange a thing is death,/bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers/The buck in the snow./How strange a thing—a mile away by now, it may be,/Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass/Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow—/Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.”
Isn’t that beautiful? Can you “see” the picture Ms. Millay is painting? Do you like “the feather of snow”? How about the hyperbole of “blood scalding the snow” and the personification of death? My students usually figured out that the buck had been shot, even though the poet doesn’t say that in so many words. A wonderful word picture, no?
OK, class dismissed. Go home and read some poems!
PS: To my awesome readers: Enough already! Don’t send any more words made from postal abbreviations! It was great fun reading all of your “entries,” but I gave up trying to keep score.
Here are a few of my favorite responses: Dodge County Judge Joe SCIASCIA; WALA WALA, WA; COCA COLA; MAHI-MAHI; COALMINE; LANDMINE; CONCORDE; RICOLA; MEMORIAL; MALARIAL; ALPACA.
Thanks for reading.
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