To Learn Metonymy.
Published in 1875 as the lead essay in Letters and Social Aims, Emerson's "Poetry and Imagination" emerges from journal entries, notebooks, and lectures that range as far back as the 1840s and across intersecting topics such as poetry, readings in natural history and the natural sciences, rhetoric, intellect, and imagination. In this lengthy essay, his longest since Nature, Emerson elaborates upon a favorite topic from his journals as well as his essays: the poet's valuable and natural use of symbolism:.
For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one; and indeed.
Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures.
are tropes. As the bird alights on the bough,--then.
plunges into the air again,--so the thoughts of God pause.
but for a moment in any form. All thinking is analogizing,.
and 'tis the use of life to learn metonomy [sic]. The endless.
passing of one element into new forms, the incessant.
metamorphosis, explains the rank which the imagination.
holds in our catalogue of mental powers. The imagination.
is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts all productions.
and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses.
them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior.
to value much their primary meaning. Every new object so.
seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise. (17).
We are back, it would seem, in the poetic territory of the 1836 Nature, where nature is similarly transmuted into parts of speech and transcendentalized into a "metaphor of the mind." Or we are once again at Emerson's 1842 lecture "The Poet," the one attended by Walt Whitman in New York City, where Whitman finds Emerson emphasizing the ample world of metaphors awaiting its poet: "There is no word in our language that can not become to us typical of nature by giving it emphasis. The world is an animal; it is a bird; it is a boat; it is a shadow; it is a torrent, a mist, a spider's snare; it is what you will, and the metaphor will hold, and it will give the imagination keen pleasure.