Emma Hoff

https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Poetry-Soup-Ep.-21.MP3.mp3 Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Today, I’d like to talk about another literary technique that is often used in poetry – extended metaphor. Metaphor is a common technique in poetry, as well as in prose. It is a comparison between two things used to make a point or describe something bigger. The two objects being compared are called the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the thing the metaphor is talking about, while the vehicle is the comparison or the thing used to express the tenor. An extended metaphor, or conceit, is the same as a regular metaphor, but it is longer. Often, an entire poem can be one extended metaphor. The word conceit came around during the renaissance, in relation to themes in writing. Soon people began to use it as it is used now, as a word for a long metaphor.  Extended metaphor is a technique that I have personally struggled with. It helps me a lot to see how other writers use this technique in their work. A popular example of extended metaphor is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18,” (“Shall I compare thee to a summers day”) where Shakespeare describes how long youth and beauty lasts by talking about how summer doesn’t last forever and eventually dwindles away. Though Shakespeare doesn’t mention youth outright, we are able to understand his meaning because of his extended metaphor. The poem goes: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Shakespeare writes that summer is beautiful, but only for a short while. A man’s life and youth, on the other hand, now that it is written about in poetry, will last forever. It is immortalized in words. We understand this from the comparison of human beauty with the beauty of summer. Shakespeare’s extended metaphor helps us understand the poem’s meaning. The type of conceit that Shakespeare uses is called the Petrarchan conceit, a type of extended metaphor where the speaker exaggerates his love for someone. However, this is not the only type of conceit. There is also a metaphysical conceit, which often talks about an abstract idea in terms of a concrete object. A metaphysical conceit often talks about a spiritual idea or about love. For example, in “The Coronet” by Andrew Marvell, the poem talks about a speaker who wants to weave a crown of flowers for Christ to wear to replace the crown of thorns placed on his head when he was crucified, only to realize that he should be humble and that the best Jesus Christ could do to his crown is to step on it. The poem says, “That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,/May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.” In the case of Marvell’s poem, the crown – which is also meant to symbolize the poem itself – is a metaphor for pride. When the speaker should be humble, he is arrogant instead. Another example of an extended metaphor in poetry is in book 8 of “The Odyssey” by Homer. In this part of the poem, Odysseus is listening to a minstrel singing and is weeping because he is thinking of the war he has been through and all his comrades and men who have died. It goes, “And Odysseus let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks, weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord on the lost field where he has gone down fighting the day of wrath that came about his children. At sight of the man panting and dying there, she slips down to enfold him, crying out; then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders, and goes bound into slavery and grief. Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks; but no more piteous than Odysseus’ tears…” The extended metaphor in this stanza is the comparison of Odysseus crying because of all the struggles he has been through on his journey and all the men he has lost to a woman crying when her husband dies on a battlefield. However, the image of the dying husband and how it affects his wife is drawn out in detail, making it an extended metaphor rather than just a normal one. The woman sees her husband killed on the battlefield and rushes to him, but the metaphor continues, showing how she becomes a slave of the enemy. Similarly to the Shakespeare poem, it includes a hyperbolic element to help emphasize the depth of Odysseus’ feelings. A more recent poem that I think is a great example of an extended metaphor is “Tamer and Hawk” by Thom Gunn. The poems of Thom Gunn often take inspiration from those of John Donne, a poet who used extended metaphor in his poetry, often in the form of metaphysical conceits. Gunn’s poem uses the image of a hawk being domesticated so that it only does the bidding of its tamer to express being in love with someone and always thinking about only them. The entire poem is an extended metaphor. I thought I was so tough, But gentled at your hands, Cannot be quick enough To fly for you and show That when I go I go At your commands.   Even in flight above I am no longer free: You seeled me with your love, I am blind to other birds— The habit

https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Poetry-Soup-Ep.-20.MP3.mp3 Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. In this episode, I’m going to do something different from what I normally do – instead of talking about a particular poem or poet, I’m going to be talking about a writing technique called ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a literary device that involves the translation or adaptation of one media to another, or a different interpretation of it. For example, a poem written about or based on a painting is a type of ekphrasis, as is the opposite. From the Ancient Greeks to classical literature, ekphrasis has been used since the days of Homer and Plato (some of the first people to dabble in ekphrasis)! There are many examples of ekphrastic poetry and prose, as well as paintings (the famous painting by John William Waterhouse, called “The Lady of Shalott,” was based off of a poem of the same title by Alfred Tennyson). There are many different ways of writing “after” a painting. You can simply describe the painting, or you can use it as a sort of springboard, a jumping off point, to expand the story the picture is telling. You can even add dialogue to the scene in the painting, ultimately re-writing it and transforming it, or you can imagine what the artist is doing outside the frame. These are all examples of ekphrastic writing. Ekphrasis is not limited only to writing and painting, however. There have been examples of ekphrasis where music has been inspired by poetry, prose, or art, like the piano piece “Pictures at an Exhibition” by the composer Modest Mussorgsky. I use ekphrasis a lot when I write, especially with poetry. One of the first poems I published, titled, “The Ambassador,” was an ekphrastic poem, after the painting, “The Mute Orpheus,” by Giorgio De Chirico. The painting shows a robotic-looking figure sitting in a chair with a lyre on the ground next to it. The backdrop is a cluster of buildings devoid of people. In my poem, I blended a description of the painting with my own ideas about what could be happening. I focused a lot on the figure in the painting, who I referred to as “the ambassador.” To write the poem, I had to study the painting for a while and notice the small details. By doing this, I was able to draw comparisons between it and the things I’ve seen in real life. I wanted to show the feelings of the mysterious figure and talk about its thoughts. Some famous examples of ekphrastic poems are “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” explores the scene of the famous Brueghel painting by the same title and talks about the perspective of the painter. The poem begins with the lines, “According to Brueghel/when Icarus fell/it was spring,” referencing the painter. Some famous works have examples of ekphrasis in them, even though you might not have noticed them! Both “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” by Homer have descriptions of art in them, and “A Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde is written around a painting. Ekphrasis helps emphasize the connection between writing and other forms of art that has been written about and explored time and time again. The poem I talked about in the last episode of Poetry Soup, “Falling Upwards” by David Shapiro, suggested this by showing the beauty of music through writing, putting the two together.  I’d like to share with you a poem of mine that was published in my poetry collection, “An Archeology of the Future.” The poem is called “A Photograph by Pedro Luis Raota,” and is about a photograph I saw that moved me. I’ll attach the photograph in the transcript below. The early death of the man behind the camera propels him to make everything live forever, for it all to be old, like the woman, barely looked at by anyone. And as the soldiers pass by, their guns heavy on their shoulders, the scene is immortalized in shadows and darkness. At home, he blurs the figures angrily, but they’re still marching through the streets,    and the woman is somewhere else now, kneeling on the ground. Nobody looks at her, except the photographer, and he only has his camera, what good will that do her? Just a man who finds her interesting, but has nothing to offer other than her picture.   Still, the photograph finds its way onto the wall, framed but then destroyed by what we will never know, and still the gray wall persists, people striding past it, the woman still there, the photographer gone, and suddenly, all the world had ever known was erased, and new things came quickly and startled the people. No longer would pictures be taken, they all declared. In this poem, I described the photograph (which was of an old woman sitting against a wall while silhouettes of soldiers pass her) and the things I saw in it, but I also thought about what the photographer was doing and how people reacted to it. So the poem talks about what’s outside the photo as well as the photo itself. Looking at the photograph through the lens of a poet, thinking about it in terms of a poem, made me better understand it. What was the photographer thinking when he took the shot? Who was this woman and what was she thinking? What did other people think of the picture? The black and white photograph seems very melancholy to me, highlighting the horrors of fighting and violence and how it affects other people. This is shown by the contrast of the woman solemnly sitting and the harsh, black shadows that the soldiers cast, complete with guns on their shoulders. I used poetry as a way of interpreting the photograph, which is part of the purpose of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis should change the way people see