AP12: Darkness and Metaphor

October 22, 2009

Review essay question answers. Samples here.

re: Laura’s comment that Frost’s poem is only about a moth being eaten by a spider, and that’s just the way the world is.

Frost said that a poem was metaphor or it was nothing.

If metaphor works, this suggests that patterns of meaning exist in reality and that these matter. Can you see a relation between this and Puritan typology? Or can you contemplate it in Pablo Neruda’s refusal to use metaphor:

the blood of the children ran in the street like
the blood of the children.

Some modernist poets refuse to use metaphor and other figurative language because they feel these literary devices suggest false relationships that do not actually exist.

So.

For Frost, the poem is not merely about a spider eating a moth. What is it about?