The conceit (7.24.22)

For reference, scroll down to "Conceits and extended metaphors" in the June 20, 2018 post of this blog.

Let's circle back to the conceit, that tough intellectual and emotional nut you need a tool or two to open up whenever you find one in a poem.  And again, we'll try a project--to write a conceit.  Only this time, let's not worry about extending or developing it through an entire poem, but just concentrate on coming up with one good, inventive, innovative, unusual application in a line or even just a phrase.  We'll turn that phrase on the lathe of our imagination and verbal dexterity, and see (or smell, or hear, or feel, or taste) what comes of it.  Read on to the end of this blog post for the project in detail.

What is a conceit?  Rule of thumb: a conceit is always an equivalence, usually implied, between two unlike things:

• a bed of roses
• a bed of nails
• a crown of thorns
• a sea of trouble
• grab bag of ideas

Conceits belong to the same class of figurative language as simile, metaphor, and analogy.  But they are a special case: conceits aim to link (to yoke) two essentially unlike things that you would not ordinarily put together to form a new whole.  What's more, a conceit aims for surprise (as opposed to mere cleverness); it is intellectually stimulating; it demands that you unpack it.  A conceit opens up new frontiers in meaning, and in this sense, a good conceit is expansive, never restrictive.  The metaphors listed above fall short of "conceit"; the relationships between their two parts are too transparent, and they are shopworn (clichés).

There is a certain "violence" and complexity to a conceit.  In a metaphor, which is the broader category for "conceit," the attributes of a known thing or idea (like "bed" above) are applied to another but fundamentally different known thing or idea (above: "roses," "nails").  I say above that a conceit is an "equivalence," but this is not really accurate.  Nor is a conceit, or any metaphor, for that matter, a comparison of two unlike things or ideas.  A metaphor is a "transference" from one thing to another, or better yet, an identification of one thing/idea as another.

Metaphors can be fairly "transactional" and simple, as the examples above are: bed/rose, crown/thorn, sea/trouble, bag/idea.  Or they can be more complex, much more.  Here's an example, which comes from my copy of A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams:

                    Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer;

                    Drinker of horizon's fluid line.

The lines come from a poem by Stephen Spender, a Modernist poet who, like T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, A.R. Ammons and others, borrowed from the great practitioners of the conceit, the Metaphysical Poets.  Let's unpack it.

                    [The] Eye [is a] gazelle [is] delicate [and a] wanderer; 

                    [It is a] Drinker of horizon [is a] line [is] fluid.

Spender identifies the idea of an eye with a gazelle (speed, grace, nimbleness) which is in turn identified as a creature that never rests, has no particular destination (i.e., it wanders).  That's all one thought.  Then the semi-colon, making way for a second complex of ideas: the eye drinks (as a gazelle might from a stream or pond) the horizon (as a gazelle might, scanning for danger). And of course there is the further complication or complexity of relationship between the attributes of line (fixedness) and fluidity, which is the feature we are meant to attribute to "horizon" which is "drunk" by the eye.

Not that we would normally unpack the metaphor to this degree, nor should we, normally.  Not consciously, at least.  What our subconscious minds do is another matter, and precisely the point of the "difficult" metaphor.  What we read in or into or out of the two Spender lines is considerably more expansive than what the actual words describe.  That's the associative power of metaphor and poetic language in general.

Spender's metaphor is "taut," "difficult," "packed," "yoked by violence together."  It approaches the special case of metaphor that we call conceit: it's a complex of images that appeals to our intellect and to our emotions (what we feel when we feel freedom, danger, safety, beauty, flight, struggle).

Now let's look at a very famous conceit that "yokes" together the idea of two lovers and the two parts of a cartographer's compass:

        A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

        As virtuous men pass mildly away,

        And whisper to their souls to go,

        Whilst some of their sad friends do say

        The breath goes now, and some say, No;

        So let us melt, and make no noise,

        No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,

        'Twere profanation of our joys

        To tell the laity our love.

        Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

        Men reckon what it did and meant;

        But trepidation of the spheres,

        Though greater far, is innocent.

        Dull sublunary lovers' love

        (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

        Absence, because it doth remove

        Those things which elemented it.

        But we by a love so much refined

        That ourselves know not what it is,

        Inter-assured of the mind,

        Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

        Our two souls therefore, which are one,

        Though I must go, endure not yet

        A breach, but an expansion,

        Like gold to airy thinness beat.

        If they be two, they are two so

        As stiff twin compasses are two;

        Thy soul, the fixed foot , makes no show

        To move, but doth, if th' other do.

        And though it is the center sit,

        Yet when the other far doth roam,

        It leans and hearkens after it,

        And grows erect, as that comes home.

        Such wilt thou be to me, who must

        Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

        Thy firmness makes my circle just,

        And makes me end where I begun.

This is John Donne's wonderful poem exhorting his wife not to fret as he prepares to travel from England to the Continent in 1612 (she was pregnant at the time, and suffered a still-birth while he was away).  If you consider the last two lines, you might wonder who Donne is really trying to comfort!

This poem is of course packed with tightly woven metaphors: the relatively simple metaphors of tear/flood and sigh/tempest near the beginning of the poem, which were clichés even in Donne's time; the more complex metaphoric pairing of the privacy of the marriage bed as a kind of priesthood and the workaday world (drawing Donne away) as a kind of uninitiated "laity."  The more implied the connection between the two parts of each metaphor, the more complex/taut/tensioned the life of it in your mind when you read it.  (And of course, the more difficult to parse out.)

But the main metaphor of the poem is the idea of two lovers as the fixed and movable feet of a cartographer's compass.  Donne expresses this relationship initially in the form of a simile, thankfully, for isn't this poem complicated enough already?  In fact, what makes the metaphor so "conceitful" is this insistence on surface clarity in which he spells out the relationship: this is like that.  And there's a reason for this "transparent" approach: Donne means to sustain the identification lovers/compass in every detail over the final three stanzas of the poem.  That's a lot of real estate over which to pack an image!  He needs to make clear as possible, in detail, the connections between parting, traveling, waiting at home, returning and the operation of a highly technical drawing tool; otherwise, the poem might become clever and precious, and sentimental, but will never become art.  And the beauty of the poem is in how tight these connections are, not in how heart-felt the message.

What makes this lovers/compass relationship a conceit are two things: 1) the arresting linkage of human love and technology; and 2) the point by point specificity of the identification--love works in every instance in the poem just as the tool operates.  You have to pay attention, or you'll miss the power, the poetry, of the poem.  The more you read the poem, the more expansive it becomes in your own experience of love and technology, the ways of the bed and of the world.

So.  On to our project.

For this Wednesday, write a poem in which you develop at least one complex metaphor or conceit-like construction.  Don't worry about extending it beyond a line or even just a phrase, though you're welcome to give that the old Metaphysical try if you like.  But make it fresh, arresting, expansive, that is, likely to send us as your readers into our own lockup of experience and worldview for ways to "take your meaning."

This is not a license for cuteness, sentimentality (as opposed to sentiment), cleverness, jokiness, mere weirdness and cliché.  It's a request for innovation, the unexpected, the strange-at-first-sight-but-actually-new-and-startling.  As for cliché, just look at the metaphors at the very top of this post.  Not a bed of roses, please; but maybe a pillow of noise?  Not a mind like a steel trap, but a mind that is a critter.

The fun of this project will be to come up with associations between unlike things that you would'n't ordinarily put together in the same thought, wouldn't normally relate to one another.  The trick, though, will be to make the relationship meaningful, to make it expand in your reader's consciousness either by going against expectations or by opening up to the unexpected (Well!  I sure didn't see that coming!).

Okay?  Okay.  Get busy.