I wonder how much we overuse or at least strain metaphors (to use a metaphor) when we use language to describe nature or use nature as a metphor. Lucy Boston, a great user of language in chidlren’s literature suggests that
“To all children, and particularly to small children, a love of the past is natural. It is the soil at their roots. They have but recently emerged from the stuff of it. It gives them comfort, security and a pattern”
Interesting to read, in Richard Mabey’s wonderful book Weeds, some forays into what works and what doesn’t when describing phenomena in nature – in this case, cross-continental colonisation:
“[Tim Low in Feral Future] talks as if he blames the invading plants themselves. The invaders ‘steal’ into our forests, ‘foul; our rivers. Weeds ‘fester’. St John’s Wort, source of an effective anti-depressant, is described as ‘malevolent’, mimosa as the ‘repugnant claimer of 30,000 acres of wetlands’…Low’s emotive vocabulary doesn’t help his case.”
How we over-use natural phenomena as metaphors is a fascinating topic. As one example, we have “floods” of immigrants in New Mexico, and in Europe, and Australia (although it’s interesting to note how a quick Google search is made more complex here by the real floods in Australia!). It is also noteworthy how many of the more inflammatory groups use flood – even tsunami – imagery; I won’t add to their count of site hits by linking them, but will link to Jane Lane’s materails on combatting racism. In another example, astronomy (or possibly astrology) has been used as a metaphor for interagency working with young children and families: I am not sure of the success of this image, although the photos in the powerpoint are good. And of course simile and metaphors of growth are as ancient as any in Western literature.
Perhaps they are inescapable. Richard Mabey again, this time from Nature Cure:
We constantly refer back to the natural world to try and discover who we are. Nature is the most potent source of metaphors to describe and explain our behaviour and feelings. It is the root and branch of our language. We sing like birds, blossom like flowers,stand like oaks. Or then again we eat like gluttons, breed like rabbits and generally behave like animals… It is as if in using the facility of language, the thing we believe most separates us from nature, we are constantly pulled back to its, and our, origins. In that sense all natural metaphors are miniature creation myths, allusions to how things came to be, and a confirmation of the unity of life.”
It would be churlish to distinguish between metaphor and simile here, when the real question seems to me to be Does this all simply depend on how well the metaphor works or not? Or how much one agrees with the speaker/writer?
nicktomjoe 