CLA/WLIT 196
Ancient Lyric Poetry


POETIC DEVICES: METAPHOR

Interesting examples from our texts:

Details appropriate to the vehicle may be transferred to the tenor, and vice versa:

1. Lament for Ur 79 f.

Ur burns in bitter wails with Ningal, the mistress from whom the people are parted.
Making the faithful woman, the queen, wail for her city.

Here tenor and vehicle are closely intertwined. Ur is said to be both burning and wailing, where "burning" is in one sense the tenor (since the sacked city IS burning), and "wailing" the vehicle which refers to the burning. At the same time, wailing/lamenting must have been an equally real part of the scene, so that the tenor-vehicle relationship is reversed: the passionate wailing of the city's inhabitants may be seen as an emotional "burning". We seem to have two interlocking metaphors feeding back into each other. This seems to be reinforced syntactically by the chiasmus of Ur:wails:Ningal / Queen:wails:city)


2. Lament for Ur 369-72

My lady the city weeps for you as for its mother,
Ur like a child lost in the street, searches for you,
your house like a man who has lost something, stretches out the hand for you,
the brickwork of your good house, as were it human, say of you “Where is she?” (370-2)

“My lady the city” is already a metaphor. It is then treated to a further level of imagery by being compared to child weeping for its mother. The concrete fact that children must indeed have been weeping in the streets for their mothers is never stated. Thus “my lady the city weeps”, seemingly the tenor, is itself a sort of vehicle for whats really happening.


3. Lament for Ur 184 ff.

Again the storm is already a metaphor for the attack. But it is treated as the tenor when compared to a flood (V). The storm is then described with details appropriate to flood:

The evil winds which, like to mighty waters
    escaping (through a breach)
    cannot be quelled
were battering the city’s boats
    chewing them up like a pack of dogs

A second metaphor is introduced at the end, so that the storm / flood is also like “a pack of dogs”. Some lines later the same metaphor is encountered, but this time to describe the chopping axes of the enemy:

big copper axes chewed like (a pack of dogs),
the Sua people and the Elamites

The two passages let us establish an equation between “storm” and “invaders’ axes”, both of which = pack of dogs.

Other passages showing flood imagery used to describe the attack:

The little ones, asleep on their mothers’ laps, were carried off like fishes by the water (230)
Oh my flooded, washed away, brickwork of Ur! (317)