THE METAPHOR IS DEAD----PASS IT ON
"THE METAPHOR IS DEAD," bellowed the gargantuan professor, his walrus mustache dancing and his thundery eyebrows knitting together rapaciously, "Those accustomed to lunching at the high table of literature will now be able to nosh at the trough on a streamlined sub minus the pickle. Banished is that imperial albatross, that dragooned doubled agent, that muddy mirror lit by the false flashing signal like and by that even more presumptuous little sugar lump as. The gates are open, and the prisoner, freed of his shackles, has departed without so much as a goodbye wave to those who would take a simple pomegranate and insist it be the universe.
"Furthermore," trumpeted the cagey professor, warming to his thesis and drumming on the lectern, "the dogged metaphor, that scruffy escort vehicle of crystalline simplicity, has been royally indicted as the true enemy of meaning, a virus introduced into a healthy bloodstream and maintained by the lordly shrewdness of convention. Oh, it was born innocently enough with Homer and his wine-dark sea (a timid offering but one that dropped a velvet curtain between what wasand what almost was.)
Then came Beowulf stirring the pot with his cunning kennings, and before you could count to sixteen, the insidious creature had wiggled through the window and taken over the house. Soon it became a private addiction, a pipe full of opium taken behind a screen ---- but the wavelet graduated to a turbulent ocean, and the sinews of metaphor became, finally, the button and braces that held up the pants of poesy.
WARNING------ to be continued......... |
