The rooms and the metaphors

Image from here.


1. Pretty well everything in a poem works as metaphor. Even in a poem that seems to do without an overt metaphor the understanding is that we are reading it because there are metaphorical connections between what appears on the surface and other events, other perceptions, beyond the immediate, and that those are probably more important.

2. Metaphor as an overt literary device moves us, almost without us noticing, to another level of meaning. It opens the door of one room on another room and gives us another space to move in. Voila! There we are! This too is a metaphor, of course, but a reasonably comprehensive one. The sense of movement between rooms confirms our suspicion that all rooms, like all languages, are provisional, that provisionality may, in fact, be reality.

3. In a simile it is like being shown the door, having it opened, and being told: see, that room is like a version of this room, but this room remains the real one. This too is a simile. We are still in the first room. It might be important for many reasons that we remain in the first room and merely acknowledge the existence of the other one. We do after all, live here, if you call this living. If you call here: here.

4. On the other hand, no 1 follows no 3.

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