Third Monday Musing: Metaphor

The dove-tailed world

By Eric Meub

Hugh Kenner, in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, gives us a formula for metaphor:

A/B : C/D

Metaphor, says Kenner, “affirms that four things (not two) are so related that A is to B as C is to D. When we say ‘The ship ploughed the waves’, we aren’t calling a ship a plough. We are intuitively perceiving the similarity in two dissimilar actions: ‘The ship does to the waves what a plough does to the ground.’” This gives us:

Paradise is a man's own good nature

Another thing that struck me from my friend's conversation yesterday followed from my mentioning Ezra Pound, for "hold on to none" reminded me of some lines from The Cantos, and I mentioned this to my friend, who, being a learned man and a poet, immediately recited the lines to me, from the Pisan Canto:

What thou lovest well remains,
                          the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee....

"Not that that's the same thing at all," I said, "but the language...."

My friend added, "There's an Egyptian cartouche Pound uses in one of the cantos. It means, 'paradise^* is a man's own good nature.'"

That struck me, and sticks, because it supports my recent decision to relax and enjoy life, exult in life as refracted through my own good nature.
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* My friend subsequently corrected my memory of what he said the cartouche meant: "In the quotation from the ancient Egyptian writer Kati, the word 'paradise' bears the connotation of 'painted paradise' or 'vision of paradise,' implying that this is not the real paradise, but the closest we mortals can conceive of it, given our imperfect vision."