Death makes dead metaphor revive
Death makes dead metaphor revive,
Turn stiffly bright and strong.
Time that is felt as “stopped” will freeze
Its to-fro, to-fro song
I parrot under feldspar rock
Sunk into chambered ice.
Language, the spirit of the dead,
May mouth each utterance twice.
Spirit as echo clowns around
In punning repartee
Since each word overhears itself
Laid bare, clairaudiently.
An orphic engine revs but floods
Choked on its ardent weight.
Disjointed anthems dip and bob
Down time’s defrosted spate.
Over its pools of greeny melt
The rearing ice will tilt.
To make rhyme chime again with time,
I sound a curious lilt.
“The only constant is a commitment to the thing that is song,” Riley said of her poetry in an interview with Shearsman Books. (Shearsman magazine, in fact, was the first publisher of this week’s poem, in issue 97/98). Riley’s new collection, Say Something Back, frequently foregrounds song, not least in her major elegiac sequence, A Part Song. Death makes dead metaphor revive, a poem born of her prose essay on Time, Time lived, without its flow, demonstrates the recovery of time-as-movement through the sounding of “a curious lilt”. “Curious” here suggests “eager to know” and the related word, “care”, from the Latin cura.
In the interview linked above, Riley mentions the hymns of Isaac Watts. Emily Dickinson thrived on similar metrical stringency, and the description, in line two of the poem, of dead metaphor’s capacity to become “stiffly bright and strong”, seems to evoke Dickinson’s brilliant, lapidary quatrains.
The linguists’ definition of “dead metaphor” is worth a glance. In The Language of Metaphors, Andrew Goatly defines a dead metaphor as one in which the vehicle has become so remote from the tenor that all that remains is a homonym. He gives the word “pupil” as an example: few of us now recognise there was once a metaphorical connection between the two meanings: the tenor (or, as Goatly prefers, “topic”), “young student” and the vehicle, “an opening in the eye’s iris so as to admit light”, parted company long ago.
The colloquial definition of a dead metaphor as one that has lost its force is more applicable to the poem. The third line offers the clue: “Time that is felt as stopped …” This complex passive construction already challenges the cliche inherent in it. “Time … felt as” acknowledges the subjectivity of the metaphorical interpretation. “Time that is … stopped” could be time as movement halted in its progress, time stoppered, like a bottle of liquid, and time stopped like a musical instrument. All these metaphors are linked but different. The commonest metaphor, time as a stream or river, is well-worn, and dated by its dependence on a view of time as linear, forward movement. (See here for an interesting list of 20 metaphors associated with time.) Images of ice and rock revive the “dead” metaphor of the poem by literalising it: rivers still flow seawards and can still freeze over, whatever new theories of time are advanced, and these processes still have their psychological counterparts.
The “song” that the poem’s first stanza evokes appears to be time’s. Its non-linear, pendulum-like “to-fro, to-fro” motion has halted. As we follow the sentence over the stanza break we find out that the speaker hopelessly “parrot(s)” this doomed song. She is located under the feldspar rock, and perhaps even under the frozen river, “sunk into chambered ice”.
“Chambered” suggests a burial chamber, perhaps, and a voice entombed, repetitive, echoing, punning. “The souls of the dead are the spirit of language: / You hear them alight inside that spoken thought.” These lines conclude another poem, Listening for lost people, and their passion is relived in Death makes dead metaphor revive. The latter poem, I think, is modifying the earlier thought, and saying that while the spirit of the dead is language, the words are spoken by the living, and so the dead are heard, “clairaudiently”, echoing, or seeming to echo, the living voice. “Clairaudient” is the aural equivalent of “clairvoyant” and suggests a special receptivity to what is actual, although not generally perceptible.
The notion of echo is at first bitterly, hollowly comic (“I parrot”, “clowns around”, “punning repartee”) but later seems productive. It evolves into rhyme, which is more than echo, the disturbing metaphorical turn given by stanza four to the Orpheus myth notwithstanding. Time’s flow remains awkward, not fully restored: there are non-fluent “pools of greeny melt” and “disjointed anthems” suggesting, as well as troubled sounds, the visual detritus of chunks of ice and other debris breaking up in the churning of a partly thawed river. Ice remains the dominant structure: it still rears and threatens from above, as if from the conscious mind deploring the body’s instinctive self-perpetuation.
The poem operates intriguingly between metaphor and abstraction. Musically, it varies between the lightly flowing line and the more heavily freighted. The metaphor, made real by the experience of death, not only revives but becomes fertile and breeds others more intricate and tangible – the feldspar rock, the underground “chambered ice”, the flooded engine: all operate as further stops to the flow of time. At the same time, the mineral solidity in this poem strengthens it. Echo and rhyme are real, too – and demonstrably more than reflexes obeying the banal instruction mourners are given, or may even give themselves, to “move on”. Rhymes are sometimes antithetical (“weight/ spate”): they can demonstrate a process or leap somewhere new (“ice/twice”). They can be replies as well as echoes.
• Death makes dead metaphor revive is taken from Say Something Back by Denise Riley, published by Picador priced £9.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £7.99.
