Metaphor for the Holiday
By Doug Talley

During a family night this past summer my wife and I asked the children to help plant flowers around the house.  As we worked the flowerbeds, the blue sky gradually yielded to the gold and pink shadows that typically grace an Ohio evening in July.  We spread fresh, pungent mulch on the beds.  We dirtied our hands and fingernails with rich, black earth and traced our faces as well, if we wiped a brow or scratched a cheek.  Our work promised all the wealth of a memorable evening.

At one point after digging a hole, my wife asked our four-year-old daughter Gracie for a peony.  Gracie handed over the potted flower, and upon slipping the plastic container from the balled roots, my wife said, “Now let’s place her in the hole.” 

Gracie asked, “Why did you call the flower a ‘her’?” 

“Because flowers are girls,” my wife replied.

Without so much as a nanosecond of reflection, Gracie asked, “And weeds are boys?” 

 “That’s right,” replied her mother.  In our house the majority often rules.  My son and I are outnumbered more than three to one, and so the principle is now firmly established in the family – flowers are girls and weeds are boys. 

Never too Young to Learn the Value of Metaphor

Just as rhyme and meter provide mnemonic tools to retain a profound thought forever, an apt metaphor will stir the visual imagination with ideas that constantly unfold new meaning as time passes.  My daughter Gracie reminded me we are never too young to learn the uses of metaphor. 

Recently I thought of the Savior’s metaphor when he offered a sign of the Second Coming in the budding of a fig tree:

And he spake to them a parable; Behold, the fig tree, and all the trees; When they shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.  So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand.  (Luke 21:29-31)

Now learn a parable of the fig tree; when his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors  (Matt. 24:32-33).

Always in the past I visualized a few leaves breaking open and likened these to specific events of the Restoration, as when the Father and the Son appeared to Joseph Smith, or when Peter, James and John appeared to restore the Priesthood.

This time, however, as I pondered the metaphor, I visualized the entire tree.  A young tree in early bloom often has the same spherical shape, more or less, as the earth upon which we live.  The idea of the tree first budding and shooting forth leaves over the whole surface of the tree seems analogous to the gradual spread of the Restoration on the earth, the Church budding and unfolding in various locations all around world.  The leaves, and the branches of the church, respond and develop according to the increasing light of summer.  A tree does not typically bud and leaf evenly, but some parts develop more quickly than others.  However, by the onset of summer, the tree will be fully blossomed. 

This is exactly the condition of the present day Church.  It is unfolding all around the world, in some places more rapidly and more fully than in others.  When the church is fully blossomed, the Savior will return and bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.  The process is gradual, but also quite natural. 

What an ingenious and thought provoking metaphor!  The Savior offered it almost two thousand years ago, and I have reflected on it myself for close to thirty years, and yet it still provides something new to consider.

Offer the Gift of Metaphor this Holiday

The Savior was a master of metaphor and it seems appropriate as we again celebrate His birth this Christmas season to offer the gift of metaphor to those we love most.  Again, we are never too young to learn the value of a metaphor, and so even the young child in the family might benefit.  If you struggle to know what will interest the poets in your family, I have a few suggestions.

For the young child aged four through eight (and any other child at heart regardless of age), the time-tested classic is Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.  Who better to write for children than the man who brought us Treasure Island?  Simon & Schuster offers a handsome volume illustrated by Tasha Tudor.  Stevenson explores the child’s world.  The poems are full of animals and children and children’s playthings, with barely a whisper of adults to be heard.  If you ask, you will probably find your grandparents have memorized whole sections of the book.  I remember a copy in the home I grew up in and suspect it was my first real introduction to poetry, probably at the age of seven or eight.

For the teen-ager in the household, I would recommend Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.  Everyone should be introduced to Whitman at some point, and the teen-age years are perhaps the best to begin a life-long affection for the grandfather of American poetry.  The increasing independence of spirit a teen-ager yearns for is a theme running throughout Whitman’s work.  He is the singer of the Great, Big, Wonderful Me.  What teen-ager just beginning to really explore the world and look into and beyond the self cannot identify with Whitman’s pinnacle poem, “Song of Myself” and its opening lines:

Whitman is accused of being long-winded, but it is in the very breadth of his cadence and vision that his strengths are found.  And when a metaphor is served up how delicious it is!  A child asks him, “What is the grass” and Whitman responds:

Whitman’s classic is so widely published a copy can easily be obtained in the poetry section of any bookstore.  I have a paperback edition that is probably thirty years old, published as part of the Modern Library collection by Random House.

A Question of Taste

When selecting a book of poetry for the adult reader, the matter of taste invariably arises.  The phrase “There’s no disputing taste” is as old as Rome:  de gustibus non est disputandum.  The poetry of this world is as varied as the flowers that grace the earth, and while every blossom will possess one virtue or another, still individual taste will always be a factor in preferring columbine to daffodils, or daffodils to columbine.  So how can you be sure you’ll buy the adult poetry lover in your family the right book?  There may be no better way than to simply ask, What do you want?  True, there is no surprise in this approach, but there is also no disappointment. 

I have a particular bias in wanting to promote the work of Latter-day Saint poets.  I can recommend any of the books previously reviewed in this column – Erasable Walls by Lance Larsen and Stone Spirits by Susan Elizabeth Howe.  Grant Hardy, a church member and professor of history at the University of North Carolina, compiled an interesting anthology of poems celebrating the complexity of family relationships, entitled Enduring Ties.  That anthology was also reviewed in Meridian Magazine earlier this year.  Another book I can recommend, and one on my list to review this coming year, is Leviathan with a Hook, by Kimberly Johnson, published last year by Persea Books.  Sister Johnson’ poetic voice sparkles with enthusiasm and her language is rich, dense, and luxurious.  She has an impressive list of publishing and academic credentials and was hired this past year as a professor in BYU’s creative writing program. 

My list of holiday books would not be complete without one final recommendation, New and Collected Poems, by Czeslaw Milosz, published in paperback this year by HarperCollins. Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 and is perhaps the world’s most acclaimed living poet.  He worked with the Polish Resistance in Warsaw during World War II and later as a cultural attaché from Poland stationed in Paris.  He defected to the West in 1951 and accepted a position at the University of California in Berkley in 1960.  In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.  Found in his poems is an unashamed religious sentiment that is quite refreshing in this cynical age.  In the last poem of the volume, “Late Ripeness”, he writes:

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

This Christmas season hopefully we will all find time to break from the shopping frenzy and take an hour to curl up with a good book of poetry, next to a warm fire on a snowy evening if possible, and remind ourselves we are children of the King.  Nothing can bring us closer to God, I am convinced, than just the right book.