WWW moonchalice.com

Emerson: The Oversoul

Emerson: The Poet

Questions or Comments? Please Email Me

Sylvia Plath:

"Metaphors", Metaphor, and the Number 9

Metaphors by Sylvia Plath¹

I'm a riddle in nine syllables.
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Introduction:

Metaphor as a Path to Higher Consciousness

Poets use metaphor to explore the ideas, forces and powers that lay behind our rational thought and our rational conception of the world. Ideas as living, thriving entities reveal themselves through the juxtaposition of two or more familiar ideas.

In "Metaphors", Plath superimposes the idea of her "I" or ego with ideas of objects such as riddles, elephants, houses, melons, bread, money, and cows. The "I" also identifies itself with a verbs such as strolling, eating, and boarding. Since Plath may have thought she was pregnant when she composed this poem, the idea of pregnancy(9 letters, 9 months)hovers behind the poem as a metaphor for human creation and becoming. Metaphors are embedded in metaphors, the 9 lines contain metaphors that describe pregnancy, but that whole system of metaphors is a metaphor for the essential spiritual being that manifested as "Sylvia Plath". For example:

"I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off."

The sensual pleasure of the food with its resulting sickness from overindulgence and the reference to the human "fall" through the apple image points points to both pregnancy and to her conscious or unconscious decision to offer herself as a vessel of creativity. Her decision to create is irrevocable and may be fraught with peril. She later wrote a poem, "Getting There", that expanded on the train imagery of the last line. (see discussion of "Getting There" and "Ariel" ).

The uniting of two separate ideas to create a new third idea not only increases our awareness but may allow us to experience states of consciousness experienced by ancient human beings. Owen Barfield, in many of his writings about poetry and literature, saw written language as a record of the evolution of human consciousness. Barfield challenged the conventional wisdom that traced language from primitive sounds which denoted objects and simple feelings to the metaphorical use of these simple roots to denote more complex and abstract thinking.² According to this conventional model of language development, the Greek pneuma originally meant the tangible, physical wind, then, as the human mind developed and demanded new words to express abstract ideas, pneuma was "taken over" to mean spirit or the intangible creative force of the universe.

Barfield did not accept this model of language development.³ He felt that what we consider to be abstract and intangible is really only a point of view that results from our present state of consciousness. If we can "think beyond our own thinking", we can see that ancient humans perceived and participated in objects as expressions of the spirit world and that this perception perceived the thing and the intangible concept as the same thing, a unity.⁴

Therefore, our idea that there's a concrete, material "wind" or pneuma is as late a development and as intangible as our concept of "the life principal or spirit".⁵ Both of these meanings developed from pneuma. The original pneuma we normally cannot even know because our consciousness differentiates and abstracts. We no longer perceive the original unity between things and our ideas about them which is to say the unity between things and ourselves.

Metaphor reunites objects and thoughts. Poets use metaphor to reintegrate the separateness of our abstractions. Contemplating metaphor may allow us to glimpse the former unity between ideas and the world. Then the subject-object dichotomy may be transcended and human experience may be integrated into a new totality by this consciousness-raising force.

In Saving the Appearances: A Study of Idolatry, Barfield hints at the "pregnancy" that is the creative potential of metaphor:

"When we use language metaphorically, we bring it about of our own own free will that an appearance means something other than itself, and usually, that a manifest "means" an unmanifest."⁶

Barfield then traces the possibility of memory from the time when consciousness disentangles itself from things and creates the situation where there's consciousness on one side and phenomena 'out there and opposed' on the other side. Memory occurs when the newly developed self-consciousness creates images, names, or icons from the former unity.⁷ The self-consciousness creates something new within itself which becomes the basis of language and the subject-object split. Over time these "words" or images become more concrete and definite. More importantly, they become "icons" as they gradually replace the original unitary participating consciousness.⁸

As footnote 8 points out, our names, images, words, etc. are 'parts' that were once unified. Poetical metaphor begins the process of combining these split fragments, not simply to recreate our prior participatory consciousness, but to create a new consciousness(ie a new world) that is the result of our individualization. We are in a position to join the Creator and "speak" the cosmos.

So Plath's Metaphors speaks to the embryonic memory images within us that are waiting to be birthed as a new creation. Again Barfield:

"Thus there is a real analogy between metaphorical usage and original participation; but it is one that can only be acknowledged at this high, or even prophetic, level. It can only be acknowledged if the crude conception of idols, which has dominated the last two centuries, is finally abandoned, or at all events is enlightened by one more in line with the old teaching of the Logos. There is a valid analogy if, but only if, we admit that, in the course of the earth's history, something like a Divine Word has been gradually clothing itself with the humanity it first gradually created-so that what was first spoken by God may eventually be respoken by man."⁹

So the solution to the "Riddle in Nine Syllables" is the pregnant woman in the particular and the potential world-creativity of humans generally. The solution to the most complex problems and disharmonies of the cosmos is to found within us.

Barfield's Riddle: "If nature is indeed 'dis-godded', and we again begin to experience her, as Wordsworth did-and as millions have done since his time-no longer as dead but as alive; if there is no 'represented' on the far side of the appearances, and yet we begin to experience them once more as appearances, as representations-the question arises, of what are they representations?"

Answer: "...if nature is to be experienced as representation, she will be experienced as a representation of-Man."¹⁰ ie, Human.

See Oedipus's answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. It's interesting to consider whether Plath was thinking of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The human as represented by the Sphinx radically transformed into the human as represented by Oedipus and Oedipus had the self-consciousness to recognize that from which he evolved and that which still lived as a shadow or double within him. Plath is at the evolutionary stage where we now recognize ourselves in all our conceptions of the cosmos and where we begin to exercise our creative will in shaping the universe.

(When our consciousness separates from the cosmos, then we become dessicated abstractions and lose value. This experience is central to Plath's The Thin People ).

Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "The Sphinx" penetrates the mysteries of nature and reveals the evolutionary goal of the higher genius of the Sphinx as the merger between the human "I" and the universe. Emerson's Sphinx combines elements of Sophia with the Luciferian double. The cosmic creativity has reached a stasis and yearns for the divine human ego to complete the evolution began by Oedipus and become a platform for the creative logos. Notice how Emerson describes the wholeness and divinity of Nature and then concentrates all that macrocosmic power into the figure of the sleeping babe. The Madonna provides the answer to the riddle of the sphinx with her child where:

".... the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies...":

THE SPHINX
THE Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
"Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?--
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept:--

"The fate of the man-child,
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
Dædalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking,
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep?

"Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm;
In beautiful motion
The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
Your silence he sings.

"The waves, unashamèd,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.

"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence,
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,--
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.

"The babe by its mother
Lies bathèd in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted,--
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.

"But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.

"Out spoke the great mother,
Beholding his fear; --
At the sound of her accents
Cold shuddered the sphere:--
'Who has drugged my boy's cup?
Who has mixed my boy's bread?
Who, with sadness and madness,
Has turned my child's head?'"

I heard a poet answer
Aloud and cheerfully,
"Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me.
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.

"The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;

Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of Nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.

"To vision profounder,
Man's spirit must dive;
His aye-rolling orb
At no goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found,--for new heavens
He spurneth the old.

"Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame them restores;
Lurks the joy that is sweetest
In stings of remorse.
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?--
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.

"Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,--
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.

"Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits;
Thy sight is growing blear;
Rue, myrrh and cummin for the Sphinx,
Her muddy eyes to clear!"
The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,--
Said, "Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow;
Of thine eye I am eyebeam.

"Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply."

Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave:
She stood Monadnoc's head.

Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame;
"Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am."

---

The secret of human existence resides dormant within us but occasionally makes itself known by projecting itself outward into an object or creature. This doppelganger or double mirrors our essential being and activates new levels of consciousness.

Emerson's Sphinx has caused humans to reflect on the mystery of their being and awaits the "seer" who will become conscious of the higher ego which unites with the macrocosm:

THE SPHINX
THE Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
"Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?--
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept:--

"The fate of the man-child,
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
Dædalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking,
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep?

---

For Emerson the complexities and beauties of Nature are a revelation of our inner being. He begins to solve the Sphinx's riddle by paying attention to nature. Such nature descriptions are metaphorically the inner complexity of the human:

"Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm;
In beautiful motion
The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
Your silence he sings.

"The waves, unashamèd,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.

"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence,
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,--
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill."

---

Tree, elephant, bird wings, sound, wind, waves, and primordial atoms recapitulate the whole of Nature and the inner being of Man.

The "madonna" scene provides the Sphinx's answer in the sleeping babe into which the pure joy of the the mother's life force flows.

But Emerson cannot simply accept this "tranced" consciousness as the solution to the riddle. He now recounts man's present condition of agonizing ego consciousness:

"But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.

"Out spoke the great mother,
Beholding his fear; --
At the sound of her accents
Cold shuddered the sphere:--
'Who has drugged my boy's cup?
Who has mixed my boy's bread?
Who, with sadness and madness,
Has turned my child's head?"

---

The poem hints at the mysterious relationship between the "fallen" Sophia and the Lucerferic power that brings humans ego consciousness by severing our connection to the archetypal world. Plath's doubt and pain which arises from the powers of creation in "Metaphors", the tortured ego consciousness of The Eyemote, and all human isolation is a result of the Luciferian "fall". This "fall" is a necessary stage of our evolution because it leads to self reliance and human freedom. Human love will radiate as universal love when humans love from a position of complete freedom:

"I heard a poet answer
Aloud and cheerfully,
"Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me.
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime."

"The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;

Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of Nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.

"To vision profounder,
Man's spirit must dive;
His aye-rolling orb
At no goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found,--for new heavens
He spurneth the old.

"Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame them restores;
Lurks the joy that is sweetest
In stings of remorse.
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?--
I would he were nobler
Than to love me."

---

Rudolf Steiner, in his Philosophy of Freedom, stated that human beings are the nexus where perceiving and thinking come together. Thinking is a universal process that is individualized in each separate human. Concepts are also universal. Through thinking we unite ourselves with the cosmos, with God; hence, we desire knowledge as a path to recover the unity of the God head. So human cognition unites percept and concept into knowing which is a move toward unity. We observe percepts and intuit concepts, reunifying what our consciousness has torn asunder. We bring the object back within ourselves.

So metaphor makes thinking manifest and is a path to higher cognition. It also makes the human being manifest in a way that transcends the physical and social sciences. Our evolution requires that we absorb our abstract knowledge into larger concepts that are built metaphorically; the thinking of the poet must be fused with the thinking of the researcher.

The following link reprints Owen Barfield's discussion of metaphor.( From Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning):

(http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?prmID=2233

The 9x9 Human

"I'm a riddle in nine syllables. "

(interestingly, the letter I, "I" or ego, is the 9^th letter of the alphabet ie I=9)

pregnancy=9 letters

Plath's Metaphors seeks to impose unity on divergent things and ideas in a 9x9 array or matrix. There's 9 lines and 9 syllables. In the first line the poet immediately identifies herself with the number 9. She realizes that the sounds of language, syllables which are combinations of consonants and vowels, are the actual forces of creation, the Logos or the Word at the beginning of the Gospel of John. The fundamental tone or vibration of the original creation still finds individual expression through human language. Consonants are the containers which resist and are shaped by the force of the vowels. Forces of spirit move in the vowels and these forces unite with the more physical consonants. Our entire body, soul, and spirit is made up of these language forces.

The poet cannot simply say "I am pregnant" or " I think I am pregnant". A simple prosaic statement treats pregnancy as an abstraction and communicates little to the reader. The rhythmic juxtaposition of nouns, verbs, images, and sounds allows the poet to uncover her own feeling and to unite the reader with new thoughts about pregnancy and creativity. The idea of pregnancy is "opened up" so that it may be permeated by other ideas which we don't normally associate with it. The pregnancy idea becomes a holographic nexus which reflects the unity of the world and consciousness and draws the reader out of the state of ego consciousness. Absorbing the metaphors, we stretch beyond our skins and transcend our separateness from the world. The individual ideas such as I, riddle, syllables, elephant, house, melon, red, fruit, ivory, timbers, yeast, bread, money, purse, cow, green, apples, and train are woven into a seamless transcending unity. This creates a greater idea which elevates our consciousness to embrace a new meaning beyond the abstract and prosaic.

"An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! "

Plath begins with the physical; the largeness of elephant and house. These are words of containment where the forces of the spiritual meet the physical world. These are consonant concepts similar to the Hebrew use of Beth for '"house". They point to our physical, mineral body which is impregnated by the life force, the force of time, process, and motion.

The melon is the plant kingdom and the 2^nd line begins the motion of the formative life forces. The verb "stroll" indicates this motion.

The third line names the fruits of the physical and life processes. Our experiences bear fruit in our thinking, feeling, and willing. The color red unites this segment with the blood and the passion of emotions.

Notice how this line recapitulates the previous 2 lines through the metonymical use of red fruit, ivory, and fine timbers. These "parts" of the previously stated "wholes" are aspects of the metaphorical objects and, at this stage, Plath seems to have extracted them as if they were the result of some alchemical process. They are a finer distillation of "elephant", "house", and "melon" and seem to represent the result of Plath's "digestion" of experience. Although they holographically contain the original concept because of the order of presentation (red fruit is a "window" for the entire melon), they also draw attention to a particular part of the concept. Hence, melon is more womb like while red fruit points to the placental blood and the interior forces of creation. Red fruit also draws upon passion and the martial forces and may suggest that this may be a somewhat hellish creation, perhaps threatening to societal norms.

Interestingly, the move from metaphor to metonymy¹¹ mirrors the particulizing of experience associated with Barfield's concepts of evolution of consciousness. The observer retains an image of an object which is dissociated from the object but which may be "recreated" or reenlivened consciously by the ego. Going from elephant to ivory may seem reductionist, but the "symbol" ivory is more than mere extraction. It's smoothness and whiteness and crystal like perfection are a doorway to a higher perception. What is gray, earthly, slow, and massive has been transformed to an energy which suggest the qualities of light.

Plath's intake of the raw material of life experience, sense impressions, Art and thought is assimilated and transformed into the "new being" within. I believe Plath begins to see the significance of her creative potential and how the "birthing" of her future art will tear her asunder:

"This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off. "

The leavening of bread is central to human culture; we draw our sustenance by taking grain and reintroducing a life force, the yeast, which uses the grain as host and creates a new, expanding organism which we heat kill and eat at home or in the ritual mass. This central line (the fifth or quintessence) reflects the way humans "eat" experiences and perceptions of the world to create a new and evolving inner organism.

We "eat" the world to create the bright, shiny gold of human thinking that is a beacon to the entire cosmos. As humans capable of cognition, we are in constant "becoming" (the "means, stage, and cow in calf").

We've eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and cannot return to our past states of consciousness because the ego cannot be simply thrown off and removed. Instead we must integrate our ego into the whole of the macrocosm. The responsibility for our self transformation is forever our own, although we may draw on the resources of the universal, and the expansion of our thinking to ever greater concepts is our doorway to the universal. Absorbing and understanding metaphor is a tool of this expansion.

The Perinatal Trauma of the Ego or:

The Struggle Between the Birth of the Individuated Logos(Ego) and the Tyranny of the Demons that Cloth Themselves in the Remnants of the Dying Father God

The Antonin Artaud Ego, Blood, and Spirit Sitemap

January 13, 2003

Ralph Waldo Emerson:"The Poet" and Comments

September 1 , 2003

Home to Ego, Blood, and Spirit

Comments or Questions? Please Email

Click Here for some Thoughts on "Mirror"(Sept. 2002)

Black Rook in Rainy Weather(October 2002)

November Graveyard(October 2002)

Sitemeter Copyright (c)2000 by Sitemeter.com

Get a GoStats hit counter