More than Cool Reason

A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor

George Lakoff, Mark Turner

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780226468129, 9780226468112
• eBook ISBN: 9780226470986
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A classic account of how metaphor works in literature--and what we can draw from that for everyday life--from two of the leading scholars of language

We usually think of the language of poetry, the metaphors that poets use to express their intentions, as far removed from ordinary life. But in More than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner show how understanding how metaphor works in poetry, the tasks it takes on and the ways it shapes our patterns of thought, can be hugely helpful to seeing and understanding how we think in all manner of other fields and areas of life. Metaphor, they show, is a tool so familiar, so everyday, that we fail to notice it. Lakoff and Turner correct that failure here, helping us see how richly metaphorical our language and thought are, and what that means for not only reading and enjoying poetry and literature, but also for linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and more.

ONE

Life, Death, and Time

“Because I could not stop for Death”

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

Metaphors are so commonplace we often fail to notice them. Take the way we ordinarily talk about death. The euphemism “He passed away” is not an arbitrary one. When someone dies, we don’t say “He drank a glass of milk” or “He had an idea” or “He upholstered his couch.” Instead we say things like “He’s gone,” “He’s left us,” “He’s no longer with us,” “He’s passed on,” “He’s been taken from us,” “He’s gone to the great beyond,” and “He’s among the dear departed.” All of these are mundane, and they are metaphoric. They are all instances of a general metaphorical way we have of conceiving of birth, life, and death in which BIRTH IS ARRIVAL, LIFE IS BEING PRESENT HERE, and DEATH IS DEPARTURE. Thus, we speak of a baby being “on the way” and “a little bundle from heaven,” and we send out announcements of its “arrival.” When Shakespeare’s King Lear says

Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air

We waul and cry . . . (King Lear, 4.4)

he is using an extension of the very ordinary metaphorical conception of birth as arrival (“came hither”) that we use when we speak of a baby being on the way. Mark Twain said he “came in” with Halley’s comet and would “go out” with it—and we all understand that he was talking about birth and death. To speak of someone, after a serious operation, as being “still with us” is to say he is alive, with the “still” suggesting the possibility of imminent departure. Someone who is “at Death’s door” can be spoken of as “slipping away.” If a patient’s heart stops beating and a doctor gets it started again, the doctor can describe this as “bringing him back.” And if a doctor, after an operation, emerges from the operating room and says “We lost him,” then we know the patient died, because something that is lost is absent.

All this may seem obvious, but there is an important theoretical issue at stake in these examples: metaphor resides in thought, not just in words. There is a metaphorical conception of death as departure that can be expressed in many different ways, such as “passing away,” “being gone,” and “departing.” Though we would not normally speak of a coachman coming to take away someone who is dying, we nonetheless normally conceive of death as a departure and speak of it that way. And when Emily Dickinson speaks of Death as a coachman, she is using an extension of the same general and ordinary metaphorical conception of death as departure that we use when we speak of someone passing away.

We use the death-as-departure metaphor in making sense of Dickinson’s poem. We can see this by noticing that nowhere in the first four lines is anything said about departure with no return. And yet we know when she says, “The Carriage held but just Ourselves” that the passengers are not simply sitting in the carriage or going for a visit or a spin around the block. We know because we understand death as a departure with no return. Because we conceive of death in this way, Dickinson does not need to state all of the details: we know them by virtue of knowing the basic conceptual metaphor.

Life and death are such all-encompassing matters that there can be no single conceptual metaphor that will enable us to comprehend them. There is a multiplicity of metaphors for life and death, and a number of the most common ones show up in the Dickinson poem. To begin to sort them out, let us return to the line “Because I could not stop for Death—.” We understand here that what the speaker cannot stop are her purposeful activities. A purposeful life has goals, and one searches for means toward those goals. We conceive metaphorically of purposes as destinations and of the means to those destinations as paths. We speak of “going ahead with our plans,” “getting sidetracked,” “doing things in a roundabout way,” and “working our way around obstacles.” Thus there is a common metaphor PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, and such expressions are instances of it.

When we think of life as purposeful, we think of it as having destinations and paths toward those destinations, which makes life a journey. We can speak of children as “getting off to a good start” in life and of the aged as being “at the end of the trail.” We describe people as “making their way in life.” People worry about whether they “are getting anywhere” with their lives, and about “giving their lives some direction.” People who “know where they’re going in life” are generally admired. In discussing options, one may say “I don’t know which path to take.” When Robert Frost says,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference,

(“The Road Not Taken”)

we typically read him as discussing options for how to live life, and as claiming that he chose to do things differently than most other people do.

This reading comes from our implicit knowledge of the structure of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. Knowing the structure of this metaphor means knowing a number of correspondences between the two conceptual domains of life and journeys, such as these:

—The person leading a life is a traveler.

—His purposes are destinations.

—The means for achieving purposes are routes.

—Difficulties in life are impediments to travel.

—Counselors are guides.

—Progress is the distance traveled.

— Things you gauge your progress by are landmarks.

—Choices in life are crossroads.

—Material resources and talents are provisions.

We will speak of such a set of correspondences as a “mapping” between two conceptual domains. Thus we will speak, for example, of destinations being mapped onto purposes.

When we read “Because I could not stop for Death—” and understand that what the speaker could not stop are her purposeful activities, we can understand those purposes as destinations and her life as a journey to reach those destinations. The occurrence of the word “Death” in the line suggests the reading that what she declines to stop is her life’s journey. The second line, “He kindly stopped for me,” and the occurrence of “Carriage” in the third line make it clear that what is being talked about is a journey.

Life is a journey with a stopping point, and that stopping point is death’s departure point. Consequently, death too can involve a journey with a destination, So we speak of going to the great beyond, a better place, our final resting place, the last roundup. In Greek mythology, when you die, the ferryman Charon carries you from the shore of the river Styx across to the underworld. In Christian mythology, you ascend to the pearly gates or descend to the gates of hell. Other religious traditions, such as ancient Egyptian, also conceive of death as a departure on a journey. So, when Tennyson discusses death he refers to it as “when I put out to sea.” When John Keats, discussing death, says “then on the shore / Of this wide world I stand alone,” we understand that the shore is death’s departure point, and that land’s end is life’s end.

Dickinson’s coachman is taking her on death’s journey, as we can see in the full poem:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For his Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess—in the Ring—

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—

The Dews drew quivering and chill—

For only Gossamer, my Gown—

My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground—

The Roof was scarcely visible—

The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity.

In this poem, Death is taking the speaker on a journey, and the first part of the journey reviews the stages of life that one traverses during life’s journey. We interpret the children at school as referring to the stage of childhood, the field of ripe crops as referring to full maturity, the setting sun as referring to old age, the dews and chill and the near darkness suggested by the phrase “scarcely visible” as referring to the onset of death, and the swelling of the ground as referring to the final home of the body—the grave, the end of life’s journey.

How do we understand so easily and naturally that the sequence of things the speaker mentions refers to the sequence of life-stages, to childhood, maturity, old age, death? The answer, in part, is that we know unconsciously and automatically many basic metaphors for understanding life, and Dickinson relies on our knowledge of these metaphors to lead us to connect the sequence she gives to the sequence of life-stages. As we shall see, we use the basic metaphor PEOPLE ARE PLANTS to understand that the “Fields of Gazing Grain” suggests maturity. We use the basic metaphor A LIFETIME IS A DAY to understand both that the setting sun refers to old age and that the dew and chill and near darkness refer to the onset of death. In understanding the swelling of the ground as referring to the final “home” of the body, we use both what we will call an “image-metaphor” and the basic metaphor DEATH IS GOING TO A FINAL DESTINATION. Let us see how each of these metaphors works in detail.

PEOPLE ARE PLANTS

In this metaphor, people are viewed as plants with respect to the life cycle—more precisely, they are viewed as that part of the plant that burgeons and then withers or declines, such as leaves, flowers, and fruit, though sometimes the whole plant is viewed as burgeoning and then declining, as with grass or wheat. As Psalm 103 says, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” Death comes with the harvest and the falling of the leaves....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Life, Death, and Time
• 2. The Power of Poetic Metaphor
• 3. The Metaphoric Structure of a Single Poem
• 4. The Great Chain of Being
• Conclusion
• More on Traditional Views
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Metaphors
• Index of Topics