Or suppose the poet is a woman, meditating upon the coming of old age, and reflecting that age brings riches of its own. Observe how this thought is "troped"; i.e. turned into figures which re-present the fundamental idea:
"Come, Captain Age,
With your great sea-chest full of treasure!
Under the yellow and wrinkled tarpaulin
Disclose the carved ivory
And the sandalwood inlaid with pearl,
Riches of wisdom and years.
Unfold the India shawl,
With the border of emerald and orange and crimson and blue,
Weave of a lifetime.
I shall be warm and splendid
With the spoils of the Indies of age."
[Footnote: Sarah N. Cleghorn, "Come, Captain Age.">[
It is true, of course, that a poet may sometimes prefer to use unornamented language, "not elevated," as Wordsworth said, "above the level of prose." Such passages may nevertheless be marked by poetic beauty, due to the circumstances or atmosphere in which the plain words are spoken. The drama is full of such instances. "I loved you not," says Hamlet; to which Ophelia replies only: "I was the more deceived." No figure of speech could be more moving than that.
I once found in an old graveyard on Cape Cod, among the sunny, desolate sandhills, these lines graven on a headstone:
"She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
This memory of what hath been,
And nevermore will be."
I had read the lines often enough in books, but here I realized for the first time the perfection of their beauty.
But though a poet, for special reasons, may now and then renounce the use of figurative language, it remains true that this is the characteristic and habitual mode of utterance, not only of poetry but of all emotional prose. Here are a few sentences from an English sailor's account of the fight off Heligoland on August 28, 1915. He was on a destroyer:
"Scarcely had we started when from out the mist and across our front, in furious pursuit, came the first cruiser squadron—the town class, Birmingham, etc.—each unit a match for three Mainzes; and as we looked and reduced speed they opened fire, and the clear 'bang-bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink….
"The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance like a wildcat mad with wounds.
"Our own four-funnel friend recommenced at this juncture with a couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly, and we really did not care a d——, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession, like elephants walking through a pack of dogs, came the Lion, Queen Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters. How solid they looked! How utterly earthquaking!"