12-20-2011, 05:29 PM
rbl, sorry to sort of hijack your thread, but both Abu Nuwas and Erthona bring up a topic that bears a little further discussion in relation to this poem and to reading poetry in general.
To my reading, which is not authoritative, "red" is used here less as a colour (though the synaesthesia that Ray mentions was first to my mind also) than as a metonym, using an accepted effect as substitute for an outright statement. Red is often a motif for danger, destruction, anger, blood, passion, heat -- it's rarely a quiet thing, at least in our Western culture. Thus the "tangled scent" becomes a symbol of chaos, or rather I'd say mischief given it's only a scent, not a full-on stench
Words have a great deal of weight, and it's not always apparent in a surface reading.
(12-20-2011, 05:16 AM)abu nuwas Wrote: colours do not smell, and so it is devoid of meaning
(12-20-2011, 05:13 PM)Erthona Wrote: does a line like "the tangled scent of red" convey any meaning, or is it the attempt to appear to be saying something profound when there is nothing profound about it?
To my reading, which is not authoritative, "red" is used here less as a colour (though the synaesthesia that Ray mentions was first to my mind also) than as a metonym, using an accepted effect as substitute for an outright statement. Red is often a motif for danger, destruction, anger, blood, passion, heat -- it's rarely a quiet thing, at least in our Western culture. Thus the "tangled scent" becomes a symbol of chaos, or rather I'd say mischief given it's only a scent, not a full-on stench
Words have a great deal of weight, and it's not always apparent in a surface reading.
It could be worse