A Literary Essay on Functions of Metaphors and Similes in Gary Sotos Poetry

Metaphorically speaking, Gary Sotos poetry strongly resembles the art of photography in its attention to minute details of daily life, in its pursuit of human spontaneity and its ability to find beauty in places where one would never have believed it could exist. With its compassionate and attentive eye, Sotos poetic camera zooms in on things that usually go unnoticed in the everyday routine, like leaving a small tip at a restaurant or having a blister after a hard days work. But in Sotos poems these mundane acts, objects, and problems become symbols of the human condition. To give the reader a fresher look and a new understanding of them, Soto effectively employs natural phenomena as components (likewise tenors and vehicles) of his metaphors and similes. Resorting to nature both as a source and a target domain, Soto creates complex and extended metaphors as a means of metatextual unification of his poetry, as well as profound philosophical cognition of the world.

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In most of his poems, including poetic meditations on the daily troubles of urban dwellers, Soto resorts to the images of nature as metaphors, which perform a number of various functions. One can divide the scope of them into two major groups. The first one includes natural metaphors used in order to clarify a certain situation, uncover hidden parallels or make abstract notions more tangible. In this group metaphors often expand, branch out and ally themselves with other metaphors forming interesting metaphorical clusters which possess intrinsic semantic synergy. Such metaphors unify the poems and also connect them with the other poems where the same source domain is being utilized. The second group is comprised of unexpected, i.e. creative metaphors, which help attract the readers attention and direct it towards a certain idea or image. These metaphors operate on a local level, enriching the microimagery of the poem and keeping the readers imagination alert. Any classification of such kind, including the one offered above, is provisional, at the same time it might help better understand the mechanics of metaphor in Sotos poetry.

In the first group, most metaphors are built on an implicit association of different aspects of the human condition with natural phenomena, such as, for example, the sun, water (rain, river, mist) and the stars. In his poem A Red Palm Soto employs one of his favorite images, the sun, in order to develop the theme of hard, yet necessary and to a certain extent gratifying daily manual work. Sotos lines The sun is a red blister // Coming up in your palm (Soto) bring together two essential images: burning sun high over the cotton field and hands sore from the days work. An interesting effect achieved by the author is that of metaphoric ambiguity: it is not ultimately clear if the sun is the tenor or the vehicle. The structure of the sentence suggests that it is a tenor. In such a case the whole metaphor brings forward the stifling heat that the narrator is experiencing. But at the end of the poem, the author returns to this metaphor, creatively interchanging the tenor and the vehicle: You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm, // The sore light you see when you first stir in bed (Soto). Here the tenor is obviously the blister the witness of hard manual labor of the narrator. While Soto creates a frame structure effectively unifying the poem, two images merge into one producing new meanings. The hard work of the narrator is as inescapable as seeing the sun: all in all, the sore light you see when you first stir in bed is the price one must pay for the lights in your home: That costs money, yellow light // In the kitchen (Soto). In A Red Palm Soto builds an ingenious metaphoric structure where the extended metaphor is looped: the beginning makes the readers wait for the clarification given at the end, which sends them back to the beginning to verify the newly gained understanding.

The same tendency to combine traditional meanings with creative interpretation can be observed in the way Soto utilizes the source domain of water. In his famous poem Saturday at the Canal Soto dwells on teenage dreams that remain dreams without a chance to become reality. The poem is introduced with a line I was hoping to be happy by seventeen which sets the horizon of the readers expectations and helps interpret the final lines: We wanted to get out. The years froze // As we sat on the bank. Our eyes followed the water, // White-tipped but dark underneath, racing out of town (Soto). In the context of the poem, the reader perceives the water of the river to be a submerged complex metaphor where the tenor is the life itself. While the boys grow older and become adult men, nothing changes in their daily routines (The years froze), they stay in their hometown, while life rushes past them. The impression of swiftness and fluidity opposed to immovability of frozen years is intensified through the detalization of the image of the river as being white-tipped but dark underneath like a mountain stream and personification of the water as racing out of town, both of which add new layers of meaning to the metaphor life is a river.

If a mountain stream is compared in Sotos poetry with youth and active life, aging and maturity are interpreted through the lens of another metaphor from the source domain Water, the fog. Through a creative personification, the author enables the reader to see the fog as something that simultaneously covers things up and discloses their deeper essence: The fog: // A mouth nibbling everything to its origin, // Pomegranate trees, stolen bicycles, // The string of lights at a used-car lot, // A Pontiac with scorched valves (Soto). In the same way, the fog casts its spell upon human beings too: In Fresno the fog is passing // The young thief prying a window screen, // Graying my hair that falls // And goes unfound, my fingerprints // Slowly growing a fur of dust (Soto). Soto creates a complex metaphor by introducing the image of a fur of dust, where dust, mainly composed of loose scales of human skin, is to a certain extent a human equivalent of fog, dispersed condition, unstable and passive. These two concepts, fog, and dust, serve as an introduction to the final lines of the poem: One hundred years from now // There should be no reason to believe // I lived (Soto). Thus, in Sotos poem, fog, while being, in fact, a tenor of the mouth metaphor, on a deeper level serves as a vehicle in the submerged metaphor mature age is mist, which is made explicit only in the final lines of the poem.

Another rich image borrowed from the source domain of water is introduced in Sotos poem How Things Work with the help of a tandem of an extended metaphor and a simile: The tip I left // For the waitress filters down // Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child // Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go // Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat (Soto). Soto creatively connects images money is water, money is rain, and living creatures are plants in order to rethink a stereotype that represents the money spent on trifles as wasted. Water in Sotos poem is interpreted as rain which gives life to plants, likewise, daily circular flow of money is what ensures financial balance in the society: A tip, a small purchase here and there, // And things just keep going. I guess (Soto). In this poem, the choice of the metaphor seems to be determined by the narrative situation: the narrator explains a rather complex issue to a child and therefore needs to make it more tangible.

The second group of metaphors creative metaphors which operate on a micro level and can be found in most poems written by Soto is rather heterogeneous and multifunctional. In the poem A Red Palm, which may serve as an illustrative example, the author uses an intricate stylistic structure of a telescoped personification: You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds // Fall with a sigh. You take another step, // Chop, and the sigh comes again, // Until you yourself are breathing that way // With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town (Soto). First, the author uses personification in order to create an animated image of the weeds falling under the hoe, then the sigh that the weeds produce becomes a character of its own an independent personified character that will follow you into town (Soto). In the final part of the poem the author creates a metaphoric arch by returning to the image of the sigh: You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants (Soto). Through this extended personification, the author achieves an interesting effect the image of a sigh connects the weeds and the person eliminating them into one unity as if with every swing of a hoe, with each sigh some part of this human beings life energy goes away. To support this creative solution, the author uses a number of other personifications, such as Dust settles on your forehead, dirt // Smiles under each fingernail, The wind makes peace with the trees, The stars strike themselves in the dark (Soto). These metaphors work together to create a pantheistic picture of the world where nature is alive and a part of every human being while every human being is an integral part of the nature itself. While the poem effectively underlines how hard and draining manual labor is, on a deeper level it also offers to look at the other aspects of the relationship human beings - nature. In this case metaphors serve as signposts pointing towards alternative interpretations.

Gary Sotos poetry reflects the world into which he was born. The nature of California has become an inspiration for many of his ingenious metaphors. Their complex nature and deliberate design have allowed the author to explore such abstract ideas as human existence, aging, and death, work, ambition, and money through making them more tangible.

Works Cited

Soto, Gary. Poems. PoemHunter.com, 2005, www.poemhunter.com/gary-soto/. Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.