Mid-morning. During the night you had dream
images of the setting construction. Before you consciously forget them, here
they are: the Greek background setting is dark save for the two vertical
outline eye images. The color of the outlined eyes is as the spiritual flames
drawn by William Blake. The spiritual light reflects off the Greek-like stone
imagery ever so dimly – but enough. Between the eye outlines is a transparency so
starkly naked that it allows one to see only a starless darkness, a seemingly
subtle and filled void on the other side of the Greek-like stone form. Grammar
play begins to flow from the two voids within the red-orange outlines. Drop in
a Blake image here: - Amorella
Ancient
of Days by W. Blake
1031
hours. G---D’s breath is as the wind that blows the Angel’s hair. Between the
Angel’s legs is the entrance of the darkness of the Void (rises up in words
from my humanity’s spirit).
The word
play is grammar oriented and poetry of a sort. – Amorella
1100
hours. I had several words last night – a play on spelling such as hole and
whole. Could and would are two examples – the pre-souls were as would rather
than balsa made wings. B-zing and the like. The ‘eye or I’ before being – and words
between with meaning of their own – vowel letters each as a noun – word meaning
misplaced to show a different perspective as to what language might be more
metaphysically bent than imagined. We say the word and miss another meaning
entirely. I flashed a neo-classic stance such as in Swift’s “Verses on the
Death of Dr. Swift”.
** **
Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.
BY JONATHAN SWIFT
As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From Nature, I believe 'em true:
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.
This maxim more than all
the rest
Is thought too base for human breast:
"In all distresses of our friends,
We first consult our private ends;
While Nature, kindly bent to ease us,
Points out some circumstance to please us."
If this perhaps your
patience move,
Let reason and experience prove.
We all behold with envious
eyes
Our equal rais'd above our size.
Who would not at a crowded show
Stand high himself, keep others low?
I love my friend as well as you
But would not have him stop my view.
Then let him have the higher post:
I ask but for an inch at most.
If in a battle you should
find
One, whom you love of all mankind,
Had some heroic action done,
A champion kill'd, or trophy won;
Rather than thus be overtopt,
Would you not wish his laurels cropt?
Dear honest Ned is in the
gout,
Lies rack'd with pain, and you without:
How patiently you hear him groan!
How glad the case is not your own!
What poet would not grieve
to see
His brethren write as well as he?
But rather than they should excel,
He'd wish his rivals all in hell.
Her end when emulation
misses,
She turns to envy, stings and hisses:
The strongest friendship yields to pride,
Unless the odds be on our side.
Vain human kind! fantastic
race!
Thy various follies who can trace?
Self-love, ambition, envy, pride,
Their empire in our hearts divide.
Give others riches, power, and station,
'Tis all on me a usurpation.
I have no title to aspire;
Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher.
In Pope I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh I wish it mine;
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six;
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, "Pox take him and his wit!"
Why must I be outdone by
Gay
In my own hum'rous biting way?
Arbuthnot is no more my
friend,
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce,
Refin'd it first, and show'd its use.
St. John, as well as
Pultney, knows
That I had some repute for prose;
And, till they drove me out of date,
Could maul a minister of state.
If they have mortify'd my pride,
And made me throw my pen aside;
If with such talents Heav'n has blest 'em,
Have I not reason to detest 'em?
To all my foes, dear
Fortune, send
Thy gifts; but never to my friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But this with envy makes me burst.
Thus much may serve by way
of proem:
Proceed we therefore to our poem.
The time is not remote,
when I
Must by the course of nature die;
When I foresee my special friends
Will try to find their private ends:
Tho' it is hardly understood
Which way my death can do them good,
Yet thus, methinks, I hear 'em speak:
"See, how the Dean begins to break!
Poor gentleman, he droops apace!
You plainly find it in his face.
That old vertigo in his head
Will never leave him till he's dead.
Besides, his memory decays:
He recollects not what he says;
He cannot call his friends to mind:
Forgets the place where last he din'd;
Plies you with stories o'er and o'er;
He told them fifty times before.
How does he fancy we can sit
To hear his out-of-fashion'd wit?
But he takes up with younger folks,
Who for his wine will bear his jokes.
Faith, he must make his stories shorter,
Or change his comrades once a quarter:
In half the time he talks them round,
There must another set be found.
"For poetry he's past
his prime:
He takes an hour to find a rhyme;
His fire is out, his wit decay'd,
His fancy sunk, his Muse a jade.
I'd have him throw away his pen;—
But there's no
talking to some men!"
Selected and
edited from - http://www.poetryfoundationDOTorg/poem/174539
[I find it
difficult to stop this wonderfully honest poem early.]
** **
1310 hours. The early flowers are earlier and up two inches. Who says global warming isn’t real. First, it will be palm trees in Atlanta and eventually in Cincinnati. We’ll be long gone but the Earth moves on around the sun and the sun around the galaxy.
1607 hours. I am not sure my use of the word ‘flash’ has been defined. It is not the same as intuition unless intuition is a mental visual image rather than ‘comprehensive understanding’.
A mental visual is what a ‘flash’ is. Detail that is gained from it may be intuitive. It is not a form of the ancient aboriginal’s spiritual sense known as ‘dreamtime’. When people dream visuals they do so without the immediate use of eyes. – Amorella
1710 hours. Speaking of a mental visual, I think I have the ‘eyes’ facing outward towards one another rather than inward. Shouldn’t they be ‘facing’ the other way?
Try; see how it looks. - Amorella
1719 hours. This imagery appears counter intuitive.
Keep the eyes as you have them, they could just as easily be as vertically hanging fried eggs. You are viewing from inside the shell that holds the heartanmind in a rather womb-like though inorganically constructed complication metaphysical conceit, boy. – Amorella
1731 hours. That’s the word, Amorella: metaphysical conceit, that’s the poetic form. I could not think of it. I had it in my head yesterday morning, but lost it. Awesome. Most cool.
** **
Metaphysical conceit is a literary term that refers to a poet’s use of somewhat unorthodox language and language construct to describe the quality of an everyday concept. This literary tool, devised in the 17th century, is often used to describe seemingly intangible concepts like an entity’s spiritual and emotional qualities, for example, by using verbose and sometimes paradoxical analogies to objects, like those from the earthly worlds deemed mundane, philosophical, and alchemical in nature. The metaphysical conceit is only one type of “conceit” that is found in literature; a generic conceit can be described as an elaborate metaphor that draws parallels between two dissimilar objects. The Petrarchan conceit is another type, and it is out of this conceit, famously used in love poems of the Elizabethan era, that the concept of metaphysical poetry and conceits as a genre arose. Its use is seen by some as a dramatic tool by which writers relieved themselves from the established, expected, and orthodox conceptual associations common of the era.
The small group of men and women who began using the literary tool in the 17th century were English lyricists thought to be associated and banded together by their desire for more robust and intellectual discourse through prose. Two of the most well-known metaphysical poets who used metaphysical conceit prolifically were John Donne and Andrew Marvel. Donne is considered by some literary researchers to be the one of the chief poetic innovators of metaphysical poetry. His prose was often times seen as being in direct reaction to the accepted Elizabethan form of the day. For example, almost all published English and “civilized” love prose published during Donne’s life was in the sonnet form and Donne used rugged, colloquial language that seemed at times to even mock the sonnet.
An effective metaphysical conceit is noteworthy when a seemingly absurd gesture of parallelism begins to render as startling appropriate and makes the reader look at something in a totally new way. To compare, a poet employing Petrarchan conceit may describe a woman’s eyes as “shining like the stars in the night sky,” while the metaphysical poet, namely Richard Crashaw in this example, described a woman’s eyes as “two walking baths; two weeping motions, portable and compendious oceans.” Another example of metaphysical conceit, which shows how the prose was considered vulgar and even blasphemous by many, is in Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14," which, among other shocking conceits, contains one that compares God to a rapist and violent invader. Modern poets like T.S. Elliot and Emily Dickenson also employed conceit in their prose.
Selected and edited from - http://www.wisegeekDOTorg/what-is-metaphysical-conceit.htm
** **
And, a second definition with examples:
** **
Conceit Definition
Conceit is a figure of speech in which two vastly different objects are likened together with the help of similes or metaphors.
Conceit develops a comparison which is exceedingly unlikely but is, nonetheless, intellectually imaginative. A comparison turns into a conceit when the writer tries to make us admit a similarity between two things of whose unlikeness we are strongly conscious and for this reason, conceits are often surprising.
For example, it will not surprise us to hear someone saying, “You are a snail” or “You are slow as a snail,” as we understand that the similarity is drawn on a common quality “slowness”. We, however, will definitely be surprised to hear someone comparing “two lovers with the two legs of a draftsman’s compass.” Thus, conceit examples have a surprising or shocking effect on the readers because they are novel comparisons unlike the conventional comparisons made in similes and metaphors.
Conceits in Everyday Life
In everyday life, we can surprise and amuse others by using conceits like “Love is like an oil change,” or “The broken heart is a damaged china pot.” In these examples, the attempt to compare two noticeably unrelated objects makes the comparisons conceits. The conceits in real life may give complex ideas and emotions an air of simplicity by comparing them to simple day-to-day objects as in “My life is like a free online game, people seem to be playing with it.”
Conceit Examples in literature
Let us analyze a few examples of conceit in literature:
Example #1
Shakespeare makes use of a conceit in Act 3, Scene 5 of his play “Romeo and Juliet”. Capulet comes to Juliet’s room after Romeo has left. He finds her weeping and says:
“Thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind;
For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,
Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is,
Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs;
Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,
Without a sudden calm, will overset
Thy tempest-tossed body.”
He compares Juliet to a boat in a storm. The comparison is an extended metaphor where he compares her eyes to a sea, her tears to a storm, her sighs to the stormy winds and her body to a boat in a storm.
Example #2
The term conceit usually reminds us of the examples from metaphysical poets of the 17th century, of whom John Donne stands out as the best exponent of the use of “Metaphysical Conceits”.
John Donne in his poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:
“If they be two, they are two so As stiff
Twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.”
This is one of Donne’s most famous ingenious conceits. He compares his and his beloved souls with the two legs of a drafting compass. He compares her soul to the “fixed foot” and his to the other foot. He says the bodies of lovers may be separate like the two legs of a compass but are always joined at the top that reminds us of the spiritual union of the two lovers.
Example #3
We find another striking example of conceit in John Donne’s poem,
“The Flea”:
“Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is”
In the above lines, the poet tells his darling that she has no reason to deny him sexually as the flea has sucked blood from both them and their blood has mingled in its gut, so the flea has become their “wedding bed”, though they are not married yet.
Function of Conceit
Because conceits make unusual and unlikely comparisons between two things, it allows readers to look at things in a new way. Similes and metaphor may explain things vibrantly but they tend to become boring at times because of their predictable nature. Conceits, on the other hand, surprise and shock the readers by making farfetched comparisons. Hence, conceit is used as a tool in literature to develop interest in readers.
Selected and edited from - http://literarydevicesDOTnet/conceit/
** **
1754 hours. How could I have forgot the metaphysical conceit [to use in this context]? Never-mind though, as now I have it back.
You were born from a dictionary sorrowfully lacking a single descriptive word, boy. Post. - Amorella
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