03-12-2015, 12:26 PM
If you suppose I'm clinically depressed,
I don't appreciate your kind dismay.
So what? I haven't had a meal today,
or made my bed, or even gotten dressed!
(Obsessed, I'd just neglected to ingest.)
I mined for words to prove in the assay;
I dug up metaphor that would convey
the deepest nuance readers can digest.
So don't be worried that I've lost my mind.
I couldn't feel the hours passing by;
I never heard my stomach's aching groan.
I'd been transported to a place behind
the world, where time's an evanescent lie
and every glinting word's a precious stone.
It's very ambitious - and I mean that as a real compliment. My objection would be that you develop two conceits: the first of eating - or the lack of eating, and the second, obviously, of mining: and they combine in line 8; but nowhere else. You've also got two ideas - that the conceits/metaphors are carrying: emotional emptiness and literary creativity.
Classically, the idea is usually to condense the ideas into one conceit: this is the basic meaning and structure of metaphor. In a very real way the 'pleasure' that poetry, rhetoric etc give is this formation of 'condensed' structures. Shakespeare does it endlessly - look at his sonnets or, given your poem, this:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Two ideas; one conceit.
I don't appreciate your kind dismay.
So what? I haven't had a meal today,
or made my bed, or even gotten dressed!
(Obsessed, I'd just neglected to ingest.)
I mined for words to prove in the assay;
I dug up metaphor that would convey
the deepest nuance readers can digest.
So don't be worried that I've lost my mind.
I couldn't feel the hours passing by;
I never heard my stomach's aching groan.
I'd been transported to a place behind
the world, where time's an evanescent lie
and every glinting word's a precious stone.
It's very ambitious - and I mean that as a real compliment. My objection would be that you develop two conceits: the first of eating - or the lack of eating, and the second, obviously, of mining: and they combine in line 8; but nowhere else. You've also got two ideas - that the conceits/metaphors are carrying: emotional emptiness and literary creativity.
Classically, the idea is usually to condense the ideas into one conceit: this is the basic meaning and structure of metaphor. In a very real way the 'pleasure' that poetry, rhetoric etc give is this formation of 'condensed' structures. Shakespeare does it endlessly - look at his sonnets or, given your poem, this:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Two ideas; one conceit.