Seeking Metaphor

Metaphor’s the soul of poetry: this incongruous instrument of speech with which we say one thing, when we mean quite another: I wish that Shakespeare, its greatest English user, had coined a truly English word for it – or perhaps, those blunt and foursquare Anglo-Saxons who came before; their words as hand-hewn as are spades – the word comes from the Greek, and means a transference; ‘My lord, your transference is apt and shrewd…’ no, even that’s but transferred to a Latin stem, ‘carrying across’. Too late to seek some native word – a ‘thoughtshift’ or a ‘mindmatch’ then? We wear it down, and make it less by thoughtless grabbing at the candy-jars upon the shelves of sweetshops of our speech, as if to mimic poetry that we haven't earned.. but at its height, a metaphor shines like new light; bringing together, two images so disparate and making of their neighbouring, a moment magical in memory as if we’d never seen the world so brilliant or so revealing; moments when the mind’s a god, and life itself a metaphor; a glimpse that somewhere, two things mentioned meet under the astonished, single gaze of eternity itself.. Metaphor’s a holy sacrament: one should never dare to use it without some faint echo, of a moment clear recalled when that which one refers to, came dazzling bright into the mind as life transfigured to another world, time lifted to the timeless; the radiance of the world’s first day, Creation, in itself, one glorious godly metaphor.. and nothing ever less than one.