LEND ME YOUR EAR: POETIC LANGUAGE STILL WITH US

"Figures of speech" is a term we learned in connection with memorizing and studying poetry in the upper grades. We didn't know at the time that it applies to all speech and writing. Everyone uses words and phrases with meanings other than literal, whether to illustrate or merely give color and shade to our meanings. Most of the figures we use are cliches, and we resort to them because we know others can relate.

Seldom if ever have we sat down and said to ourselves, "I shall now make up some figures of speech for future use." Instead, we depend upon old familiars such as "burning the candle at both ends", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", or anything from the Bible or Shakespeare.

James Kilpatrick, master of poetic prose, recently sponsored a contest in creating similes. He expected a few hundred entries, wound up with more than 10,000. No doubt he was overjoyed to discover how many Americans wanted to work with words for the fun of it. He divided the contest into four categories, and the winner of each received $25. I doubt anyone on Capitol Hill entered.

The four categories called for similes using the words "slippery", "serene", "rough", and "graceful." Only Kilpatrick would have considered balance as well as variety in assigning these four. Results were published in four successive Writer's Art columns. Winners were as follows:

1. "The old card sharp was as slippery as the new deck of cards he was dealing." 2. While scandals rocked the legislature, the speaker appeared as serene as last year's winner at this year's beauty contest." 3. "The hand the old fellow extended to me was cracked and calloused, rough as a rip-sawed board."

Number 4 resulted in a tie, and for lack of space we quote only the one containing both simile and metaphor: "Spring breeze is wind with its sleeves rolled up, skipping daffodil to daffodil like graceful snips of garden shears."

As most of us know, the difference between the simile and metaphor is that the simile compares, the metaphor transfers one object or person to another. "Skipping like graceful snips of garden shears" compares. "Spring breeze is wind with its sleeves rolled up" transfers breeze to wind. Wind with its sleeves rolled up adds a bonus known as personification.

To our immense satisfaction, we still have writers to whom figures of speech come naturally, James Kilpatrick being among the best known. Examples gleaned from current magazines present other writers still brave enough to embellish without overloading or appearing labored in their efforts:

In The New Yorker dated July 8, reviewer Brad Leithauser wrote of Colin Martindale's strange work, "The Clockwork Muse": "His...book is built, like a coral atoll whose aggregate mass is all but submerged, upon a mountain of numbers." Martindale's thesis that poetry begins and ends with numerical data is too far out to impress the reviewer. Leithauser is a poet in his own right, and shows it even in his summary: "Martindale...makes readers feel they've stepped out of a literary text into the world's largest footnote."

Garrison Keilor, in a story appearing in a July New Yorker, described the sermons of a Minneapolis preacher in this wise: "His words rolled off the walls like ocean surf; in Studio B, the waves hit a big sponge." On Kuralt's Sunday Morning, a concertmaster stated of pianist Richard Goode's inventive style of playing Beethoven, "Playing Beethoven is (for Goode) taking some of the padding out of the old sofa."

James Wolcott, reviewing a current movie, described Robert Redford as "moving like a honeybee through molasses." "Jay Leno," the able critic continued, "hasn't let fame leave a lazy bathtub ring around his career."

Several weeks ago, this newspaper included a section devoted to the annual State Fair at Sedalia. Among the astonishing attractions in the Dairy Building was a new tiger-striped ice cream that must have been irresistible to the adventurous: "This black and gold delight is Oreo cookie cocoa and French vanilla flavored, looks like a tiger and tastes like a dream."

Ice cream that looks like a tiger and tastes like a dream gives us hope for the survival of poetic language as well as the American dairy farm. But watch out for those animal rights loonies!