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Leaves:
How often are leaves or flowers used as metaphors to evoke images of death or birth or the cycle of death and rebirth in literature? Not being a literary person, I tend to miss a lot of what I read, though I can think of a few obvious examples.
"Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
the wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop,
the leaves of life keep falling one by one.
(I love the Rubaiyat and keep a copy near all of my terminals. I recite often, but seldom read them. A Persian buddy told Fitzgerald's translations did about 70% justice to the original, which seems pretty good. Another one told me that he and his buds would sit around reciting them to each other while they got roasted.)
There's that Robert Frost poem
"Nature's first green is gold
...
her early leaf's a flower
...
the leaf subsides to leaf
..."
In the road not taken, the entire forest is a metaphor for a single life and maybe for the interconnection of all lives.
Leaves of Grass (the one about the ploughman comes to mind ... the rest is kinda vague in my mind).
Thomas'
"Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain"
Waves or tides:
Thomas
"Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
...
Or waves break loud on the seashores"
Dickenson
"Nor yet a floating spar to men who sink and rise
and sink and rise and sink again"
(not sure if this one counts, really)
Are there other examples from poetry and are there examples from literature other than poetry? Do poets still use this kind of imagery or is it considered too obvious? For novels, I can't usually figure out what's intentional from what's just coincidence.
What other metaphors are used? Are there some that are very subtle?
There's this emporer of ice-cream business that I read in Wallace Stevens once, but I never had an idea of what he was going on about or a remote liking for it until I discovered an explanation for it much, much later. Now it seems very beautiful to me, macabre, gothic.
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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From Song of Myself:
6.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any
more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken
soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colourless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and
children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at
the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
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old hand
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old hand
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I am grass let me work.
Ahh, my fallible Friend, may I join you in waxing fatalism?
And the angels all pallid and wan -
uplifting, uprising, affirm
that the play is the tragedy 'Man'
and it's hero-The Conqueror Worm.
-Poe
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the hero-the Conqueror Worm
In a similar vein:
"A man may fish with the worm that have eat of a king, and eat of the fish that have fed of that worm."
Worms make out very well in poetry. But then so does mud:
"Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay, Could stop a hole to the keep the wind away."
Which brings us back to the Rubaiyat:
"All the saints and sages who discussed
Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust
Like foolish prophets forth
Their words to scorn are scattered
And their mouths are stopped with dust."
Is Ash Wednesday approaching?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Amy Lowell in Patterns , counts out a year so
Squills and daffodils give way
to Pillered Roses, and to Asters
and to snow.
and marks a date, by noting
The lime tree was in blossom
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Carpal Tunnel
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BIRCHES
by Robert Frost
WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them 5
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.
(evidently the current copyright scenario for all of Frost's poetry, currently renewed and held by his daughter)
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Carpal Tunnel
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AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE
by William Blake
[opening quatrain]:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of Your hand
And Eternity in an hour
[closing quatrain]:
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.The Auguries of Innocence Blake , William -- full text: http://www.bibliomania.com/0/2/81/200/16084/1/frameset.html Blake, William (1757-1827) - English poet, engraver, and mystic who illustrated his own works. A rare genius, he created some of the purest lyrics in the English language. Blake believed himself to be guided by visions from the spiritual world. Auguries of Innocence (1803)
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Carpal Tunnel
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If nature is life, nature is death:
It is winter as it is spring:
Confusion is variety, variety
And confusion in everything
Make experience the true conclusion
Of all desire and opulence,
All satisfaction and poverty.
by Delmore Schwartz
from Phoenix Lyrics
© 1957 by Delmore Schwartz
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old hand
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Flowers are often a metaphor for a blooming life and beauty. 'Sons and Lovers' is a novel with many references to flowers; in fact, nature acts as a liaison between the timid adolescent Miriam and the hero of the autobiographical tale. Various flowers also quietly convey two different relationships to the reader too.
The plucking of a flower is often used metaphorically to express sexual experience, but in 'Sons and Lovers' it is a crushed flower which serves this purpose. Good book anyway.
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OP
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I only recently read Sons and Lovers. I was thinking of that very book when I earlier referred to not being certain whether certain references were intentional or coincidental. I don't have to wonder any more. Not sure why I didn't think of Birches. It crossed my mind, but I knocked it out of the way for some reason. Mostly, I didn't care much for Leaves of Grass, but the passage quoted above is one of the best one. Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 also uses the leaf metaphor http://
http://www.cswnet.com/~mgoad/html/shakespeare__william_-_sonnet_73.htm
"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 ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day .... " One my all time favorites is Gerard Manley Hopkins' Spring and fall to a young child. http://
http://www.cswnet.com/~mgoad/html/hopkins__gerard_manley_-_spring_and_fall.htm
"Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? ..." k
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