Metaphor, one of the charming artifacts of mind, has evolved. Certain areas of contemporary poetry reveal metaphor achieving levels of spectacular. Though metaphor often appears in prose as well as in speech, poetry is the field most congenial to metaphor’s marvel. The evolved metaphor differs distinctly, and somewhat measurably (metaphorically speaking), from the simpler forms of metaphor. The additional feature is characterized by the term “synesthesia.”
         Synesthesia refers generally to the phenomenon of concomitant sensation, the doubling of effect when a stimulus applied to one modality of sense gives rise to a sensation in another, as when a sound induces the visualization of a certain color. This concept, imaginatively applied to literature, facilitates a candid glimpse into the dynamics of an enchanting and colorful talent of language.
         The term synesthesia has long been in use in regard to language, but only in its literal application, referring to those metaphors which combine material associated with one modality of sense with that of another, as in the touch-visual of cool blue, or the visual-aural of chocolate tones. This narrow interpretation wastes the exuberant potential of the term. A more illuminating concept can be built upon that foundation. With a touch it unveils the intriguing persona lurking within our iridescent dome of language.      
         The evolved metaphor develops a character and an identity uniquely different from simple metaphor, but as yet enjoys no particular recognition on its own merits. A bolder and more effective adaptation of the term synesthesia to literature would replace modality of sense, in the above definition, with modality of context. This eliminates specious barriers and allows us to mobilize the range of vocabulary required to gain insight into the mysteries of metaphor in its higher stages of development.    
         The fabulous character of the evolved metaphor, or the synesthetic effect, can be taught to yield at least a marvel of its secrets by both a close inspection of the philosophy of metaphor, and by examples of its various manifestations in literature. In metaphoric structure in general—using the term to include the most widely used figures of speech, i.e. simile, personification, double entendre, pun (intended), etc., each of which in its own peculiar fashion employs the concomitant sensation—the flow of meaning departs from literality for a brief excursion into a related area in order to effect, by comparison or juxtaposition, a heightened rapport.    
         In simple metaphor, the related area of the point of comparison is obviously contextual, as in hot as hell, heat an alleged bold characteristic of hell, as lightness is to a feather. However, in the synesthetic metaphor, the point of comparison is decidedly incontextual, clearly out of or beyond ordinary context, as in the following. From Gene Frumkin’s “La Femme”:    

         Red hair … 
         and a voice that lounges in a bar at midnight.
         Her walk a banana peel … 
         A golden oil sliding from a tube … 
         And though her lips are a circus of sin …
         her body is thinner than a daydream         
         and her eyes are no more in love with me 
         than a field of blue forget-me-nots.    

From Louis Ginsburg’s (Allan Ginsburg’s father!) “My Sons, Watch Out”:

         This is a dangerous age. 
         Our history’s trapped. 
         Our century leaks disaster. 
         More dangerous is the avenue. The girls …
         They walk abroad like little conflagrations.
         About their smoldering opulence, peril curls …
         From Federico Garcia Lorca: 
         Death laid its eggs in his brow … 

or: 

         Between her fingers the red thread
         Seemed a knife-wound in the air …    

         In the synesthetic metaphor, apocalyptic illumination is the intent, an expansion of meaning by fanning the deck, lacing meaning with brocades of charm, art and wit. The opposing extreme is the analogy, employed when focused meaning is required, as in the heart is a pump. While charm and wit associate with expressions of a lighter character, they are appropriate to deeply serious matter as well, as in this flare of insight from Tennessee Williams’s synesthetic image from his poem “The Beanstalk Country”:

         You know how the mad come into a room 
         too boldly, 
         their eyes exploding on the air like roses.    

         Scintillating as a flash, meaning mounts its echo, arrives upon the scene by carom, a fine ricochet, a comprehensive three-cushion billiard denouement. The synesthesia performs as a highly paid verbal pyrotechnic in which literality literally comes loose at the seems. Written to the core, vivid legibility is its transparent motive.    
         To illustrate graphically, metaphoric effect forms the ABC of a triangle as meaning flows prosaically along a straight literal line, and then darts out at an angle from point A to a comparison point (point B) where it picks up its load of vivid or graphic references forming the metaphor, then rejoins the literal line at point C, where it tenders its contribution to the flow. However, point B of the synesthetic metaphor differentiates itself from point B of the simple metaphor by being clearly outside the literal context of its subject term (point A), beyond its outer contextual or modal limit, and well into an area designated by the phrase general frame of reference, as in Stanley Kiesel’s synesthetic metaphor about a kindergarten child, from his poem “The Divine Average”:        

         There was Mark, whose vision weighed a ton …

           The phrase weighed a ton has no contextual relationship with vision, while in the simple metaphor hot is directly contextual to hell. The relationship is found, of course, in the root literal meaning of the colloquial weighed a ton. By canny selection of the afforded possibilities, meaning arrives at the literal approximation: There was Mark, whose clear, guileless perception placed unbearable responsibility on his ingenuous comprehension.… Weighed a ton is clearly not within the literal contextual field of vision, but, in the unique contextual scale set up by the concepts employed, it leaps for a perpetual instant into that general frame of reference, and proves dramatically communicative.    
         In this manner, synesthesia kindles meaning in volleys, flashing from cloud to cloud, fuming with values of imaginative color and wit. If it seems paradoxical that so apparently complex and sophisticated a quality of language can be simultaneously rich as well as clear, the fact is that the compounding effect, or stacking up of meaning, is actually a form of semantic pictorializing. Technical sophistication is evident only if the semantic picture is both accessible and vivacious. Without this tandem result, the attempt remains an obscure failure.
         Synesthetic activity appears even more frequently in the implied metaphor than in the formal structure. Any part of speech can imply the entire triangular formation of metaphor merely by being a few degrees off routine context, forming a configuration by virtue of its implied literal root. Continuing the line by Stanley Kiesel quoted earlier:

         There was Mark, whose vision weighed a ton,
         Becalmed on his two buck teeth … 

         The word becalmed is metaphoric, and indeed synesthetic. Rendered into direct, literal prose, becalmed carries the general meaning of inhibited. In the scale of context, the two words inhibited and becalmed are not synonymous, but they relate within a broader frame of reference. The words hinder, restrain, intimidate, impede, though in varying degrees metaphoric, would not be synesthetic because they are reasonably contextual. But becalmed is synesthetic because it is a form of inhibition contextual to another modality entirely, that of the sea and the motion of ships upon it, and it further prospers as it associates with sails, which two pathetically wind-blown white teeth might remotely resemble.
         The following lists a number of words which, working from the root term inhibit, will attempt to illustrate each stage of the contextual scale, the literal, the metaphoric, and the synesthetic, with approximately perceptible areas of hegemony for each. First the literal, terms with no quality of the metaphoric about them, the meanings of which remain well within the bounds of syonymity (or literality): constrained, restricted, hampered, thwarted, repressed. These terms maintain a strictly prosaic level, expressing narrowed, analogous, focused meaning, with no attempt at expansion of meaning through association.          
         Second, the simple metaphor, terms which are beyond the literal and synonymic, yet remaining perceptibly within context: retarded, obstructed, immured, quelled, hushed, blocked, lulled. With these words, a sense of metaphoric activity begins to take place, a feinting motion off the straight literal line, a certain if minor involvement of associative faculties.    
         Third, the synesthetic metaphor, words which are not within the specific context of inhibited, but which are yet within its general frame of reference: bridled, shackled, blockaded, muzzled, cloistered, each representing a form of inhibition contextual specifically to other modalities. With these terms, a geometry of rapport is aroused, and associations embark upon dazzle. With becalmed, brilliance is achieved, meaning picks up character like a posse, local color rubs off from several points of contact as the idea comes caroming back in from far out, beyond context, warmly illustrating meaning rather than merely defining it. These terms suggest the palpable distinctions between the simple and the synesthetic metaphor.
         From the basic level, that of the figure of speech, where metaphoric structure (triangular) appears in as little as two words (one being the unspoken, implied literal topic root), the effect expands into broader figurative manifestations, such as the image, and beyond that, the conceit. The first stage of complexity above that of the figure of speech is (1) the image, an interrelated combination of figures such as Alvin Taylor’s line from his book Sinistro And Celebrations:     

         The lion rose, and when he spoke    
         His voice was monogrammed like a Ronson lighter.

         The image carries the relatively rudimentary simple metaphor into the expert and highly professional compound synesthesia, in which synesthesias pile upon each other like a sky scraper, simile upon metaphor upon synesthesia, creating internecine reactions in which the synesthetic effect conjugates upon itself geometrically. This enlightened activity is apparent in the Tennessee Williams line quoted earlier, in which, in the image: Their eyes exploding on the air like roses, the word exploding becomes a synesthetic metaphor on eyes, the topic root of the image. The phrase on the air is a literal development contextual to exploding, however it becomes synesthetic in its relationship to eyes. Like roses, while contextual to on the air, is a perfect synesthetic simile on the metaphor to explode, with the additional phenomenon that in its relationship to eyes, it functions as a brilliant synesthesia, as beautiful esthetically as it is exquisite in its depth of human regard.  
         Alvin Taylor’s image of the lion develops two synesthesias building upon a simple metaphor; spoke and voice function as simple metaphors on the implied roar, while monogrammed graduates into a synesthesia on voice. Like a Ronson lighter, while operating as a mere conventional simile (in fact a cliché) on monogrammed, becomes brilliantly synesthetic in relation to the entire phrase as an additional qualification of its topic root roar.
         The term conceit—while often used as a general term, i.e., any fanciful use of language—more effectively accomodates by its ambiguity those configurations of language which differ in shape and structure from (1) the figure of speech and (2) the image. This refers to those fascinating variations in the structural components of the metaphoric triangle which employ well-known quotations, colloquialisms, even clichés, in ways not contextual to their common applications, as in Robert Graves’ “To Calliope”, a prologue to his Collected Poems:

         No, nothing reads as fresh as I first thought 
         Or as you could wish 
         Yet must I, when far worse is eagerly bought, 
         Cry stinking fish?

A brilliant example appears in X. J. Kennedy’s “Faces From A Bestiary”:

         Hyena is a beast to hate.             
         No man hath seen him copulate.
         He is unto himself a mate.
         You who this creature emulate,
         Who with your mirrors fornicate, 
         Do not repent. It is too late.    

         From these three basic stages, (1) the figure of speech, (2) the image, which covers the combinations of figures, and (3) the conceit, which employs units of larger dimension, we arrive at the fourth and largest identifiable manifestation. This might be called the conceptual synesthesia, where the concept or idea itself is synesthetic but is expressed prosaically (though perhaps rhymed), with neither figure, image, nor conceit necessarily employed. Certain poems as a whole suddenly slide off the ear to make ripples in a pool one had never noticed, causing an anxious double take. Balance is occasionally so tenuous, as in John Peale Bishop’s “Colloquy In A Garden”:       

         Is it a door you want? 
         A corridor, 
         That opens upward like a grave. 
         Why have you never asked for this before? 
         O, but I have! 
         Why do you go groping with blinded eyes
         Where earth’s a hollow sound? 
         I have long known the way to Paradise
         Was underground.

Another superb example appears in Vladimir Nabokov’s ineffably sophisticated poem “Restoration”: 

         To think that any fool may tear 
         by chance the web of when and where.
         O window in the dark! To think
         that every brain is on the brink 
         of nameless bliss no brain can bear,
         unless there be no great surprise 
         as when you learn to levitate 
         and, hardly trying, realize 
         —alone in a bright room—that weight
         is but your shadow, and you rise …

         Synesthesia makes a conspicuous appearance in other art forms as well as in poetry. The company logo has a developed tradition of putting a little sping on the ball, as God with His Puerto Rican accent counseled us to do in Bruce Jay Friedman’s play, “Steambath” (alluding, in this mysterious way, to synesthesia!). The field of advertising makes wide and varied use of the technique, as in this recent anti-smoking poster of a boy with a cigarette in his mouth above the line, Get your butt out of my face. I myself as a young ad magnate made a few contributions, one of which was the Volkswagon billboard in the early 60s (during the Cuban crisis), Drive a hard bargain. 
         The technique is—often brilliantly—advancing upon the TV commercial.
         If we have perhaps glimpsed some portion of the art and soul of synesthesia in some of its current manifestations, let us examine the work of an earlier master of the technique. Although the synesthetic effect makes an occasional random appearance throughout earlier literature (Sir Philip Sydney’s “Great with child to speak …” and “biting my truant pen …”), the most scintillating and by far the most abundant and accomplished examples prevail in Shakespeare, where, singular among his contemporaries, he gave it a local habitation and a time. While context is, of course, much a part of its age, and though language is always jiggling loose change, consider this sampling from a broad range of his work. From “Sonnet 19”:

         And weep afresh love’s long-since canceled woe,
         And moan the expense of many a vanished sight.

         The figure created by expense juxtaposed with vanished is an exhilarating synesthesia. Occasionally the line from point A in the synesthetic triangle flows through many implied referents, catching an echo here, a scent there, creating a magnificently ornate figure. From “Sonnet 33”:

         Full many a glorious morning have I seen
         Flatter the mountain tops …

“Sonnet 87” is studded with synesthesias; its final couplet illustrates a synesthetic use of vernacular:

         Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
         In sleep, a king, but waking, no such matter.

From “Antony And Cleopatra”:

         Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
         The winds were lovesick with them; the oars
         Were silver … and made
         The water which they beat to follow faster,
         As amorous of their strokes.

From “King Richard The Second”:

        … with rainy eyes write sorrow
         upon the bosom of the earth …

From “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

         The poet’s pen …        
         gives to airy nothing
         A local habitation and a name.

From “Troilus And Cressida”:

         He brought a Grecian queen,
         whose youth and beauty
         wrinkles Apollo’s …

And:

        For every false drop in her bawdy veins …

From the long poem “The Passionate Pilgrim”: 

        Lord, how mine eyes throw gazes to the east!

“Sonnet 106” offers in its octave a fine proportion of synesthesias to other poetic values:

        When in the chronicle of wasted time
         I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
         And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
         in praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,
         Then in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
         Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
         Their antique pen would have expressed
         Even such a beauty as you master now. 

        In the first line, wasted seems to slide into synesthesia, at least in current context. The second line is direct (wights are elves). In the third line, “beauty making beautiful” suggests that even redundancy has its charms. No synesthesias appear in the next three lines, although a metaphoric case could be made for “lovely.” Meter, rhyme, and quality of theme are neatly balanced with the metaphoric and synesthetic effects which have appeared. In the seventh line we have a pleasant synesthesia in “antique pen,” which is as delightful as the first time it appeared in Sonnet 19, though its values are equaled by the nobility of the meter and the perfection of the rhyme. The word “master” in the final line is the key figure which rings down the judgment of greatness upon the whole. Had a merely metaphoric term of the root context of possess been used rather than the synesthetic “master,” the effect would have been greatly diminished. Theme and technique conspire with voluptuous and passionate subtlety to a rare level of perfection.  
         As an exercise, it could prove illuminating actually to consider certain other metaphoric and synesthetic possibilities that might have been used in the place of “master.” Selecting only words with the emphasis on the first syllable, as meter requires, we find such terms as harvest, treasure, lavish, ravish, honour, etc. Of these five, the first three could conceivably be considered functionally metaphoric, but hardly approaching the synesthetic incontextuality of “master.” However, the terms ravish and honour, in this context, would seem clearly synesthetic. Although ravish might seem a bit too bizarre in tone for the rest of the poem, the word honour, as in “Even such a beauty as you honour now,” might almost be as sweet a synesthesia as the master’s master itself.    
         Obviously synesthesia and its various levels of metaphor is poetry in more intrinsic a sense than are the devices of rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. However, there is much fine poetry that contains little or no metaphor either simple or evolved, such as Matthew Arnold’s famous “Dover Beach.” A few rhymes appear irregularly throughout until the final verse, which is fully rhymed. But there is hardly metaphor simple or synesthetic, and whatever of such nature appears is negligible to the final effect, the powerfully perceived and immensely empathic melancholy. Most of the work of the past as well as the present falls into this broad range, which we might arbitrarily designate as the prosaic poem, only to distinguish it at the moment from the metaphoric or the synesthetic.        
         The prosaic poem is structured of prose elements often without the merest suggestion of metaphor, though it may be rhymed and/or metered. That such work succeeds as art indicates it succeeds at some level first as prose, whether rhymed or not. It is, after all, the idea of a work, its spirit, that presides preeminently over the devices and artifices with which it is formed.        
         Contemporary free verse has released much expression from the stylish rigors of earlier forms, the best of which allows metaphor and synesthesia to form and flow along their own intrinsic laws without impedance, as some of the previously quoted examples demonstrate. However, much other work of the day depends largely on the broken line to distinguish itself from ordinary prose. It may employ the occasional simple metaphor, but is generally prominently devoid of the full color chorus line of the synesthesia. This work may originally have been regarded as poetry because the author chose to call it poetry, identifying it as such by line breaks perhaps for no intrinsic reason other than to laud it to disguise, there being little (commercial) venue for a prose fragment of a subjective nature unless it performs under the proscenium of verse.
         While metaphor, synesthesia, and their combinations into images, are the art and soul of poetry, prose nevertheless has a significant place in poetry, aside from the fact that prose is, of course, its very foundation.Much interesting work may be appropriate to no other modality but the poem, and which may only be expressible as broken-line prose. Such work is often an exquisitely perceived very short story, its art residing not really in the phrase rhythms and design of its line-breaks, but in the very fine art of prose itself, which occasionally suffers an unfortunate gratuitous denigration from the expression “prosaic,” commonly used to refer to the unimaginative (admirers of fine prose might prefer quotidian as less offensive, inflected with only a modest shade of calumny). 
         Complaints routinely arise that much contemporary poetry consists not of metphor or image, but rather of meaningless, abstruse phrases with impressive key words that give merely the illusion of profundity—or, as Nabokov puts it, “poshlost.” It is asserted that prosaic phrase after phrase gains generous acceptance as poetry by the editorial community apparently under the assumption that anything other than obscure and enigmatic prose smacks of obsolescence. While not attempting to deny the existence of bad poetry, there is another possibility that aspires to acclaim: that somewhat like “abstract art,” the ambiguity—either deliberate or the product of misconception—provokes the reader to supply his own meanings under the proud (mis?) illusion of perceiving the author’s intent. Such an alchemy might occasionally be effective, at times even legitimate, an inadvertent gift to the uses of intellect perhaps in the way that European opera of the earlier centuries presents in the aria (as well as in “art songs”) a uniquely new art form to the English-speaking audience, where the voice and music can be ineffably beautiful, conveying deeply profound emotion, but because the language is foreign and incomprehensible, the experience fortuitously escapes being traduced by the meanings of the words, which may well be banal, foolish, insipid, or just plain badly wrotten. 
         Synesthesia represents an exponential leap into the ineffable beyond of human colloquy, hanging out on the sidelines of the poetic field anxious to perform, yearning for recognition of its merits, avid to dude things up a scoche, to put a little english on the idiom, a little sping on the ball. It evolved from stylistic yearnings for the most poetic poetry, for scintillating color compression, an identity exultantly distinct from prose, distinct beyond rhyme and meter. And, of course, to honor language with a passionate assault on its arcane possibilities. Even pop music occasionally comes through with a synesthetic charmer, as in this line from a Crystal Gayle song, “You know I like to spend my morning time like sunlight dancing on your skin.” (How would that read in prose?) 
         The ultimate poetic artifice, synesthesia is a larger part of content than the other devices, and may occasionally be entirely the content itself, as in the conceptual synesthesia. Rhyme can be credited with being only as much a part of content as the meaning of the word upon whose back the auditory echo rides; however it is usually neither metaphorical nor synesthetic but merely prosaic (quotidian) as in most pop songs.
         A tasty mix of the prosaic and synesthetic rhyme appears in Maya Angelou’s poem “Country Lover,” from her book And Still I Rise. 

         Funky blues
         Keen toed shoes
         High water pants
         Saddy night dance
         Red soda water
         And anybody’s daughter.

Consider this verse from Frost:

         No memory of having starred
         atones for later disregard
         or keeps the end from being hard.

         In these verses the transition from prose to synesthesia is not as obvious as illustrated in the earlier examples; however, if originality of wit was not previously acknowledged and emphasized as a prominent feature of synesthesia, it joins the list here as an honorary denizen, a treasured cousin of metaphor, portraying the incontextual leap in its own unique droll fashion. (Didn’t someone say ambiguity proves the rule?) Droll is, after all, not only whimsical, but includes all cleverness (ingenuity!), which can be waggish as well as poignant, joyful as well as grave. 
         Synesthesia requires neither meter nor rhyme nor even the broken line to name it poetry. It is the gift of this phenomenon of language to so fuse the style and matter of poetry as to distinguish and illuminate its spirit, coruscating equally as the language of poetry as well as the poetry of language (though of course a synesthetic value may erode over time if its cliché quotient happens to rise). 
         In the fabulous game that language delights in playing with its favorites, a certain few aspiring folk—perhaps a bit mad—spend watch on the infinite parade of unique verbal possibilities with which to communicate the treasures and mysteries of their experience, minting the brilliance that synesthesia gratuitously affords us pulsing in its sublingual depths. Beggaring hyperbole like a colossus, the 21st century bodes swell to prevail as one of the finest periods in the evolution of the art since the Cambrian.

 

Los Angeles author VAHAN GREGORY KRIKORYAN was one of Tom McGrath’s original L.A. Poets 5 in the ‘50s. Gregory was in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories 1953, and his 1974 novel Oh Boy, Here Comes Walt! was called “a minor classic” by Robert Kirsch of the L.A. Times. This essay is his only academic work.