You like it under the trees in autumn, 11/2

My Poem is The Motive for Metaphor

I also looked up the definitions of the words in the title in order to help understand the poem. Motive is a desire or reason for something and metaphor is the application of a name or descriptive term or phrase to an object to which it is not literally applicable. In other words the title of my poem means The Desire for Meaning.

The first interesting thing is that you like it in autumn and spring. As we learned in lecture summer=imagination and winter=reality. I got to thinking how people describe reality with imaginative descriptions and then when we describe our imagination (i.e. dreams) we use examples from reality. In this way the poem is looking at how we describe the world around us. According to Stevens it's not strictly in reality or strictly in imagination, it is somewhere in between the two.

This poem also talks about identity in a similar way. The obscure moon lighting the an obscure world. Also from lecture, day=reality and night=imagniation, as well as light and dark respectively. Stevens is saying that it is best for one to be obscure and imaginative with a little light and reality to form one's identity. (This also reminded me of Emerson's argument in Self Reliance) You shrink away from primary noon, or complete reality and nothing is left to the imagination or hidden from view. Stevens finishes the poem with other extemes to shrink away from: red and blue spark (in our lecture red=imagination and blue=reality), the A.B.C.s of life and the vital arrogant fatal dominant X. It is better to have a balance than to be an extreme, and yet the X is vital.

My final observation was the night before the presentations I looked online to see what was out there on The Motive for Metaphor, and found a discussion about two individuals not knowing what the poem was about, and having to write a 350 word essay on it. My word count to this point is 339. This reminded me of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. In the story the alchemist says how originally God put the process of alchemy in a single diagram on the face of a gem, and now generations later alchemy required multiple volumes of books to be described