Henrietta Goodman: METAPHOR AS SEDUCTION • Craft Essays

Henrietta Goodman
METAPHOR AS SEDUCTION

It sounds ridiculous—the first person to seduce me was T. S. Eliot. I was fifteen, in 11th grade English. Most of the poetry we read that year required a process of “translation” from antiquated to contemporary language. In “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant, I uncovered the appealingly morbid idea that because the world is so old, and people have been dying for so long, everything is made of dead people. This was kind of punk rock, but Bryant’s voice didn’t feel relevant. That spring, the journey through poetry-time stopped in 1915 with Eliot’s “Prufrock,” which began typically: “Let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky…” This romantic-sounding invitation, combined with the words “Love Song” in the title, seemed like an only slightly updated version of the familiar “thee”s and “thou”s. But there were clues that something weirder was up: “J. Alfred Prufrock” was a strange name, and the second line made the disorienting claim that evening and sky were not the same—as though space (the sky) and time (evening) existed somehow separately. And then line three took me in. The assertion that “evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table;” is shocking, silly, violent, strangely unbeautiful. It suggests the operating theaters of WW1, where ether might numb pain or cause death. It’s an image of paralysis, corresponding with Prufrock’s paralysis. And it’s an image of blood-red clouds spreading languidly across the horizon. I fell in love with that comparison, with the eye and mind that made it and all that followed: cheap hotels, oyster shells, the dog-like yellow fog. Prufrock was perennially middle-aged, balding. I was fifteen. I had a mohawk. Every morning I was tormented by a cheerleader named Tiffani who sat behind me in homeroom. I didn’t know I was going to be a poet. And then I did.

I’m not using the word seduction in a sexual sense. But I’m not not using it that way. And I’m using the word metaphor broadly, because it’s more interesting than simile or comparison. A good metaphor is one of the sexiest things I can imagine. The surprise and delight of it. The word seduce means to lead aside or astray. The word metaphor comes from the Greek meta, meaning over or across, and pherein, which means to carry or bear, from the Proto-Indo-European root bher-. And bher- appears in an assortment of words as diverse as anaphora, aquifer, birth, burden, conifer, cumbersome, difference, esophagus, euphoria, fertile, Lucifer, metaphor, odoriferous, offer, paraphernalia, periphery, pheromone, prefer, semaphore, suffer, transfer, and vociferous. It’s not so odd, then, that the carrying over or across accomplished by metaphor could also lead aside or astray—could seduce.

Sixteen years ago, I went out for drinks with a guy named Pete. I’d known him vaguely for many years—once, in grad school, he walked me home from the bar and spent the night. My clearest memory from that night was seeing his collarbones flare in a ridge and furrow that made me think of antlers. He’d been twenty-threee or twenty-four then, with a boy’s body still, a boy’s face, a boy’s cocky confidence. When we went out sixteen years ago, neither of us was young anymore. I was newly divorced with two young boys; he was in a custody battle over his four-year-old daughter. A partyer in college, now he was just a guy who drank too much. I felt even more skeptical of him than I had then, but also more lonely.

Over our first beers at the Silver Dollar, he told me he had gotten a pilot’s license, described flying a small plane one night when the engine failed—he moved his hands to illustrate the silence of the glide down to the parking lot of a convenience store where he landed, unharmed. The story was clearly meant to seduce me through the well-established connection of sex to death, or near-death, but it was what he said later that did it. Junkyards from the air, he said, look like sequins on a girl’s sweater.

The terms for two halves of a comparison, tenor and vehicle, first applied by literary critic I.A. Richards in the 1930s, are themselves metaphors. The “real” half is the tenor. This word comes from Latin (tenere: “to hold”) and its multiple meanings stem from the idea that in music the tenor part “holds” the melody. In discourse, tenor is the main idea flowing through a piece. In metaphor, tenor is the subject being described: in this case, junkyards.

Pete couldn’t have known my fondness for junkyards, the kind where you’re allowed to walk freely around the cars, searching for make, model, and part. Sometimes the rows are alphabetized, so if you need a Jeep part, or a Honda part, you know where to go. Some cars are utterly smashed; others look like you could drive them away. There’s yellowed grass, snakes, little cubes of broken glass everywhere, so much for the sun to glint off of. Coincidentally, the other half of a metaphor, the figurative, imagined half, is the vehicle—it carries the comparison.

Comparisons involve two more concepts: ground and tension. Ground refers to what the tenor and vehicle have in common; tension refers to all that they don’t. If there’s too much ground, it’s hardly a comparison at all, at least not a figurative one. We might say, “junkyards are garbage dumps,” and we wouldn’t be wrong, exactly, but we wouldn’t be interesting. If there’s too much tension, the reader can’t find a logical basis of comparison: “junkyards are whales.” Um, what? The most exciting comparisons take the biggest risks, as in John Donne’s seduction poem “The Flea,” in which Donne compares a flea which has bitten both the speaker and a woman he desires to a “marriage bed,” suggesting that since their blood has already mingled in the flea, they might as well have sex.

What makes the junkyard comparison seductive is the tension. Junkyards, traditionally, are a male realm. And sequined sweaters are from the traditionally female realm—1950s-ish, tight little cashmere cardigans buttoned up primly but flashing sequins and pearls. And there’s the size difference—a car is large; a sequin is tiny. But of course, from an airplane, large things look small, and perspective flattens. So the ground holds—junkyards from above do look like sequins.

Another example: when my friend Ryan started teaching at Eastern Oregon University, he lived in the small town of Cove. That winter, he told me he had narrowly missed hitting a herd of several hundred elk crossing the icy two-lane highway late at night. Months later, this experience manifested in his description of a “steaming train of elk” in a poem about trying to gain a sense of belonging in his new home. He and I were exchanging poem drafts regularly, and I wrote THIS IS SO GREAT!!! in the margin. But why? Here, the elk are the tenor. The steaming train is the vehicle (a vehicle is the vehicle!). And the ground is the idea that one has to stop and wait for a large number of elk to cross the road, just as one has to stop and wait for a train to pass before the safety arms go up and the lights stop flashing and the ding-ding-ding all-clear bell sounds. There’s a similarity in size and danger, too. Being hit by an elk-train, or even a single elk, would likely have the same tragic outcome as being hit by a train. Further, it’s not just a train but a “steaming” train—an image which calls up not only the idea of steam rising from the smokestack of an engine, but also the visible breath from the nostrils of a herd of elk running in the winter night, illuminated by headlights. Here’s where the tension comes in—in this metaphor, Ryan calls up (and calls out) the history of American westward expansion. As similar as elk and trains are, they’re different in one major important way—elk are living beings native to the American West, while steam trains are technological creations linked to the arrival of white settlers and the displacement of native animals, plants, and people. In a poem questioning his own place in the ecosystems of eastern Oregon, I can’t imagine a more perfect metaphor.

When I introduce comparison to poetry students, I often use Sylvia Plath’s “Cut” and “Tulips,” poems in which the comparisons pour forth like the blood from the speaker’s thumb in “Cut” and reveal Plath’s pure joy in making metaphors as well as how comparisons convey emotional and thematic content. Any descriptive language in poetry reveals more about the eye seeing than about the thing seen. The hospitalized speaker of “Tulips,” early in the poem, describes her head “propped… between the pillow and the sheet-cuff / Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.” Playing on the dual meaning of “pupil,” Plath follows this simile with “Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.” I have a student come to the board and draw the image—the speaker’s head all eye, with lids of sheet and pillow. “What happens,” I ask, “if the eye closes?” and then the death-wish that underlies the poem appears through the image of the sheet being pulled over the speaker’s face. And this is even before the tulip comparisons enter—“an awful baby,” “a dozen red lead sinkers,” “a sunken rust-red engine,” all things so unlike flowers that the pleasure of this dark poem becomes the interplay of tension and ground, just as the emotion balances between desire for death and life.

And another example (or two): a couple of months ago I asked my friend Ben, who was shifting to poetry after years of writing prose, to show me his poems. The first one he sent opened like this: “October morning and the bend of the river glitters like pawn shop jewelry…” I had to pause to process the almost physical thrill of this comparison. There’s nothing particularly fresh about comparing something sparkly to jewelry. That’s the ground. But this is not just any jewelry—and the tension! The river is moving (as time moves); the jewelry isn’t. Or is it? Jewelry in a pawn shop is in flux—stationary against dusty velvet, but only until someone comes in looking for a deal. And it hasn’t been there long—sold by someone desperate for money or just eager to be rid of it, or pawned by someone who hoped to get it back but ran out of time. Pawn shops are the opposite of jewelry stores where the wealthy go to purchase that symbol of eternal love, a wedding ring. Pawn shops are wedding ring limbo. Importantly, too, the river is glittering, not sparkling. “Glitter” is harsher, suggesting both the coming of winter (time, again) and the aphorism “All that glitters is not gold.” This vision reveals little about the actual river and much about the speaker’s way of seeing. The vehicle (pawn shop jewelry) carries us into the poem already knowing something about the I/eye who is driving his aging father home from a doctor appointment on an autumn day, looking toward the second half of his own life with uncertainty.

Near the end of the poem, the speaker observes, at sunset, “the mated pair of collared doves [that] wheeled past my ear like fighter jets…” Again, the vehicle creates the tension, but the doves (the tenor) are important too, especially the speaker’s assumption that they’re “mated,” which may or may not be so, since doves are not sexually dimorphic—you can’t tell their gender just from looking. And these are Eurasian collared doves, a lovely but invasive species. The ground is the shape and speed of the doves, a reversal of the idea that fighter jets are modeled after the aerodynamic properties of birds. But what about the tension? Doves are conventional symbols of peace and love, but these are “fighter jets,” which imply war, or at least a display of power. Much as the river turns to “pawn shop jewelry,” the doves turn to elements of the human world that we may view with ambivalence. We might read this simile (especially combined with the poem’s other moments of cultural commentary) as a reference to colonialism, or to our country’s involvement in foreign conflicts. But, too, the comparison suggests that maybe this is what it takes, if not in international politics, then in our personal lives—the soft must take on a tough edge, a dove must be both a gentle symbol of peace and a badass fighter. The comparison leads to the poem’s ending, where the speaker concludes: “wherever they had to flee to next, at least they’d be going together.” The doves have become immigrants, not invaders. “Wherever” might be another neighborhood, another country, or—to return to and complicate the poem’s initial vision of aging—death. The speaker doesn’t come right out and say he’s afraid of dying alone. He doesn’t have to.

I want to return, for a moment, to junkyards and sequins to say this: that night in the Silver Dollar with Pete was the beginning of an eight-year relationship—mostly dysfunctional and painful, damaging to my sense of who I was and how I deserved to be treated. Our breakup took years. After I was finally strong enough to separate myself and start over on my own, I wrote in a dialogue section of a long poem that appears in my fourth book: …I’m keeping this one thing, it’s mine, / the way he said junkyards from the air look like sequins on a girl’s sweater. For me, the transformation of a junkyard into a sequined sweater mirrors my own ability as a poet and person to transform the junkyard of that relationship and its aftermath into a beautiful thing, a thing I have made.

Henrietta Goodman is the author of four books of poetry: Antillia (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), All That Held Us (BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Colorado State University, 2013), and Take What You Want (Alice James Books, 2007), as well as a collaborative chapbook titled Flicker Noise (with the poet Ryan Scariano), published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her poems and essays have been published in The New England Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain, Bennington Review, River Teeth and more. She has received fellowships from the Montana Arts Council, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, and other organizations. She teaches at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT.