It offers a kind of training ground in judging how far one should travel along a metaphorical strand of thought before it starts to break down and becomes less useful – or even dangerous. This is ultimately the most important thing that poetry teaches us, for Frost.
You are not safe in science you are not safe in history.’ You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. Because you are not at ease with figurative values you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and in its weakness. ‘unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. However, poetry, he thought, can help navigate such territory more discriminatingly. Frost believed that metaphorical thinking underlies nearly all forms of human cognition, including science. Robert Frost has an interesting theory about poetry generating awareness of the limits of metaphorical thought that may provide a useful insight into what I think is happening here.
Adam john tyger scientific full#
But when I started to learn it by heart, I began to think ‘Well – which is it, Will?’ The ephemeral glory of autumn’s last show of colour which tourists flock to New England to see in the fall? Or a diminished version of this, when many of the leaves have been stripped away by the wind? Or the stark imagery of life in full retreat, when the branches are laid completely bare? It’s as if Shakespeare is aware not only of the metaphor’s power to develop thought in a uniquely evocative form, but also of where it acquires an energy of its own, breaking in different directions. This seemed fine to me when I was skipping past the line, reading for its general sense. The speaker’s ‘time of life’ is presented as equivalent to the moment when ‘yellow leaves, or none, or few’ hang on the trees’ boughs. In setting up a metaphor for his time of life quite traditionally in relation to the seasons, the speaker suddenly starts to go all wobbly about it. It was the second line of the poem that brought this sharply into focus for me when I tried to learn it by heart. Aristotle famously said that in poetry, ‘the greatest thing by far is to be master of the metaphor.’ ( Poetics) What I came to realise about this poem, though, was that Shakespeare, instead of performing his consummate mastery of the metaphor in any straightforward way, actually hesitates over how he is going to work the imagery – to the extent that he almost seems to risk losing control. It was only recently that I tried to learn it properly by heart, though, and something extraordinary, that I’d never noticed before, began to come into focus for me about the way the imagery works. It’s the imagery – lovely and sad, bordering on bleak at times – that makes the poem work, and it was one of my favourite poems even when I was younger, mercifully not thinking about mortality that much. To love that well, which thou must leave ere long. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, In me though see’st the glowing of such fire,Īs the death-bed, whereon it must expire,Ĭonsumed by that which it was nourished by. Which by and by black night doth take away,ĭeath’s second self that ties up all in rest. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day, Upon those boughs that shake against the cold īare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
That time of year thou mays’t in me behold, Here’s the sonnet, if you are not familiar with it – The age gap between them makes the speaker’s feelings of vulnerability come into focus with particular vividness and intensity. Like most of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the poem is addressed specifically to a much younger man who the poet/speaker loves passionately. It’s about feelings of vulnerability as you get older and are more in touch with dying (not that cheery sounding, I know). I’d like to share an example of this from my own recent experience, which I found revealing in a range of ways that connect with Poetry By Heart. Memorising and reciting are brilliant ways to ensure that you don’t miss things out, because you have to get all the words active inside you – and in the right order (unlike Eric Morecambe’s famous line to André Previn about musical notes!). And about what it is that can make a poem come alive for you, make you care about its details and feel connected to it.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much we generally miss out when we read for meaning.
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