and made a fool of yourself; the breath of the woman who attacked you. These associations have powerful effects on our perception. Research shows that when we drink wine our beliefs about its quality and price change our actual experience of its taste. The way food is described has a similar effect.
It’s just such associative thinking that gives poetry its power. A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. By the meticulous placing of a few simple words, they brush gently against deeply buried memories, emotions, joys and traumas, which are stored in the form of neural networks that light up as we read. In this way, poets ring out rich chords of meaning that resonate so profoundly we struggle to fully explain why they’re moving us so.
Alice Walker’s ‘Burial’ describes the poet bringing her child to the cemetery in Eatonton, Georgia, in which several generations of her family are interred. She describes her grandmother resting
undisturbed
beneath the Georgia sun,
above her the neatstepping hooves
of cattle
and graves that ‘drop open without warning’ and
cover themselves with wild ivy
blackberries. Bittersweet and sage.
No one knows why. No one asks.
When I read ‘Burial’ for the first time, the lines at the end of this stanza made little logical sense to me, and yet I immediately found them beautiful, memorable and sad:
Forgetful of geographic resolutions as birds
the far-flung young fly South to bury
the old dead.
It’s these same associative processes that allow us to think metaphorically. Analyses of language reveal the extraordinary fact that we use around one metaphor for every ten seconds of speech or written word. If that sounds like too much, it’s because you’re so used to thinking metaphorically – to speaking of ideas that are ‘conceived’ or rain that is ‘driving’ or rage that is ‘burning’ or people who are ‘dicks’. Our models are not only haunted by ourselves, then, but also by properties of other things. In her 1930 essay ‘Street Haunting’ Virginia Woolf employs several subtle metaphors over the course of a single gorgeous sentence:
How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of lights, and its long groves of darkness, and on the side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all around them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of the train in the valley.
Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to concepts that have physical properties: things that bloom and warm and stretch and shrink.
Metaphor (and its close sibling, the simile) tends to work on the page in one of two ways. Take this example, from Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World: ‘She washed old plastic bags and hung them on the line to dry, a string of thrifty tame jellyfish floating in the sun.’ This metaphor works principally by opening an information gap. It asks the brain a question: how can a plastic bag be a jellyfish? To find the answer, we imagine the scene. Cunningham has nudged us into more vividly modelling his story.
In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell uses metaphor to make not a visual point, but a conceptual one: ‘The very mystery of him excited her curiosity like a door that had neither lock nor key.’
In The Big Sleep, metaphor enables Raymond Chandler to pack a tonne of meaning into just seven words: ‘Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.’
Brain scans illustrate the second, more powerful, use of metaphor. When participants in one study read the words ‘he had a rough day’, their neural regions involved in feeling textures became more activated, compared with those who read ‘he had a bad day’. In another, those who read ‘she shouldered the burden’ had neural regions associated with bodily movement activated more than when they read ‘she carried the burden’. This is prose writing that deploys the weapons of poetry. It works because it activates extra neural models that give the language additional meaning and sensation. We feel the heft and strain of the shouldering, we touch the abrasiveness of the day.
Such an effect is exploited by Graham Greene in The Quiet American. Here, a protagonist with a broken leg is receiving unwanted help from his antagonist: ‘I tried to move away from him and take my own weight, but the pain came roaring back like a train in a tunnel.’ This finely judged metaphor is enough to make you wince. You can almost feel the neural networks firing up and borrowing greedily from each other: the tender limb; the snapped bone; the pain in all its velocity and unstoppableness and thunder, roaring up the tunnel of the leg.
In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy uses metaphorical language to sensual effect when describing a love scene between the characters Ammu and Valutha: ‘She could feel herself through him. Her skin. The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.’
And here the eighteenth-century writer and critic Denis Diderot uses a one-two of perfectly contrasting similes to smack his point home: ‘Libertines are hideous spiders, that often catch pretty butterflies.’
Metaphor and simile can be used to create mood. In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family, the narrator describes stepping outside for a cigarette break, in the midst of clearing out the house of his recently deceased father. There he sees, ‘plastic bottles lying on their sides on the brick floor dotted with raindrops. The bottlenecks reminded me of muzzles, as if they were small cannons with their barrels pointing in all directions.’ Knausgaard’s choice of language adds to the general deathly, angry aura of the passage by flicking unexpectedly at the reader’s models of guns.
Descriptive masters such as Charles Dickens manage to hit our associative models again and again, creating wonderful crescendos of meaning, with the use of extended metaphors. Here he is, at the peak of his powers, introducing us to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.
The author and journalist George Orwell knew the recipe for a potent metaphor. In the totalitarian milieu of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes the small room in which the protagonist Winston and his partner Julia could be themselves without the state spying on them as ‘a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.’
It won’t come as much of a surprise to discover the interminably correct Orwell was even right when he wrote about writing.