theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image y Metaphor> Symbol } Myth 213
form from any natural thing," but to be a work of art, a golden
bird on a golden bough. "Byzantium," from one point of view a
tightly written illustration of Yeats' "system," a doctrinal poem,
is from another, specifically literary point of view a structure of
closely interrespondent non-natural images, the whole composing
something like a prescribed ritual or liturgy. 49
Pongs' categories, which we have rendered with some freedom,
have the special character of relating poetic style to view of
life. 50 Though each period-style is seen to have its own differ-
entiated versions of them, they are essentially timeless, alternative
ways of looking at and responding to life. All three, how-
ever, belong outside of the general lines of what is often char-
acterized as modern thought, i.e., rationalism, naturalism, posi-
tivism, science. Such a classification of metaphors thus suggests
that poetry remains loyal to prescientific modes of thought. The
poet keeps the animistic vision of the child and of primitive man,
the child's archetype. 51
In recent years, there have been many studies of specific poets
or even specific poems or plays in terms of their symbolic
imagery. In such "practical criticism," the assumptions of the
critic become important. What is he looking for? Is he analyzing
the poet or the poem?
We must distinguish between a study of the spheres from
which the images are drawn (which, as MacNeice says, "belongs
still more properly to the study of subject-matter," 52
) and a
study of "the ways in which images can be used," the character of
the relationship between the "tenor" and the "vehicle" (the metaphor)
. Most monographs on the imagery of a specific poet (e.g.,
Rugoff's Donne y s Imagery) belong to the former class. They
chart and weigh a poet's interests by collecting and distributing
his metaphors between nature, art, industry, the physical sciences,
the humanities, the city, and the country. But one can also classify
the themes or objects which impel the poet to metaphor, e.g.,
women, religion, death, airplanes. More significant than the
classification, however, is the discovery of large-scale equivalents,
psychic correlatives. That two spheres repeatedly summon up
each the other may be supposed to show their real interpenetra-
tion in the creative psyche of the poet: thus in Donne's "Songs
and Sonnets," his poems of profane love, the metaphoric gloss is