theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth 199
lacks expressive function. Thus, under any traditional system,
rhyme and alliteration are both phonetic "schemes," acoustic
ornamentations ; yet both initial rhyme and end rhyme can serve,
we know, as sense binders, as semantic couplers. The nineteenth
century regarded the pun as a "play on words," the "lowest form
of wit" j the eighteenth century had, with Addison, already clas-
sified it as one of the species of "false wit." But Baroque and
modern poets use it seriously as a doubling of ideas, a "homophone"
or "homonym," a purposed "ambiguity." 23
Leaving the schemes aside, we may divide the tropes of poetry
most relevantly into figures of contiguity and figures of simi-
larity.
The traditional figures of contiguity are metonymy and synec-
doche. The relations they express are logically or quantitatively
analyzable: the cause for the effect, or the contrary ; the con-
tainer for the contained; the adjunct for its subject ("the village
green," "the briny deep"). In synecdoche, the relations between
the figure and its referent are said to be internal. We are offered
a sample of something, a part intended to stand for its whole, a
species representing a genus, matter betokening the form and
use to which it is put.
In the familiar passage from Shirley illustrative of the tradi-
tional use of metonymy, conventional accoutrements—instru-
ments or tools—stand for social classes
Sceptre and crown must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the 'poor crooked scythe and spade.
More striking is the metonymic "transferred adjective," a sty-
listic trait of Virgil, Spenser, Milton, Gray, classical art-poets:
"Sansfoy's dead dowry," shifts the epithet from possessor to
thing possessed. In Gray's "drowsy tinklings" and Milton's
"merry bells," the epithets refer to the wearers and the ringers
of bells respectively. When Milton's gray-fly is "winding her
sultry horn," the epithet calls up the hot summer evening linked
by association with the sound of the gray-fly. In all such cases,
cited out of their context, another, an animistic, kind of reading
seems possible. The distinction lies in whether associational logic
is operative, or whether, instead, a persistent personalization.
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