The Problem
This week in my Writing About Literature course, we discussed the following passage from Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher’s Literature Through the Eyes of Faith.
In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words ‘stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.
Lundin and Gallagher are at pains to make us see that literal or proper words are born rather than made. Metaphors are language’s clothing. They are language’s body, and the clothing of “proper” words only comes later.
How does this apply to God and Love, the two subjects of the 10+ poems my students read this week?
The Discussion
First, I had students talk to one another using this prompt:
What are some popular ways of visualizing and talking about God and Love in our culture? How are these images and words effective? Are there any problems with them?
In discussion, students talked about three things:
- The gap between words and actions
- The gap between popular and accurate ways of talking about God and Love
- The gap between wanting to understand God and recognizing how He exceeds our ability to accommodate Him
The Application
The poems we discussed in class developed these discussion points.
The first one, “The Lamb,” by William Blake shows us a speaker learning something about God by contemplating one of his lowliest creatures. In thinking about why Jesus would call himself a lamb, the speaker feels the joy of being able to call himself by Christ’s name. Here, in a simple, reverent poem, we see a model of what it means to use metaphors as a way to understand who God is. (“The Tyger” complicates this innocent realization, but students needed to see what that initial insight looked like first before moving to its complication).
The second one, Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” gives us a speaker who admires the woman’s beauty because of, rather than in spite of, its contradictions. She is discussed in reverent language, and her moral innocence works as the bright stars to set off her dark beauty. The students didn’t quite know what to make of this one as Byron acknowledges the moral dimension of beauty while substituting an earthly incarnation of it for a divine one. The poem’s opening simile asks us to consider how our ways of describing people and nature are interconnected and how that connection should come from our realization that God made both: that people are made in His image and that the heavens declare his glory.