Prose Discourse: Creative Nonfiction
Essay/Memoir/Vignette to 10,000 words
Sidney Burris
Counting the Metaphors
I was in a bad mood anyway, so I got up before the sun got up. Neither of these two things is unusual for me. To be clear, I know that the sun doesn’t really get up. I know that it’s a pathetic fallacy to say it does. But what’s really pathetic in this case is that I often think in these terms. I find human feelings in stuff that’s not human. Currently, I’m angry at my bald cypress because I don’t think it’s holding up its end of the bargain. It always looks depressed and sad and droopy, and I don’t need that in my life right now. Plus, I’ve been in a bad mood for decades, ever since it hit me that I was really going to die one day and that I didn’t know when that day would arrive.
In an orderly universe, I feel this is unfair, and it’s a feeling I can’t shake. If this is an emotionally dangerous game to play—and it probably is—then I’m an emotionally dangerous man. All I’m saying is I can live more easily with dangerous emotions than I can with a disorderly universe. So that’s how I ended up in my current situation. But the main reason I was in a bad mood and had gotten up in darkness was that I’d decided the night before to reread John Milton’s “Lycidas” as soon as I woke up. Sleep therapists say you shouldn’t burden yourself with like “Lycidas” before you go to bed, but obviously sleep therapists have never read “Lycidas.”
If poetry ever grabs you, and you spend any time in its grasp, you’ll look back one day and see that a good poem has a million ways to get you. Sometimes it’s just the life of the poet that does it—Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles), a dangerous, four-mile stretch of water in Turkey, and that got my attention; sometimes, it’s the simple mystery of the poet—no one really knows who Homer was, but he’s got two very long epics attached to his name, and I figured I ought to have both of them under my belt since those two epics are the main things we know about the man; and sometimes, most of the time, I suspect, it’s just the language, the way the words broadcast themselves into your life—like Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” that opens by reminding each of us that, “You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees,” and so gradually the poem became the American national poem because so many of us are done with being good, with knee-walking our way to virtues that don’t really matter anymore. Oliver gave me the courage to know when to stand up, but also when to kneel.
Poetry like that got hold of me because it stopped being poetry. It became something else. An order of words, maybe, that I could use to do things I’d never before used words to do—like explain the world, or even better, show me a world that needed no explanation. So I walked on my knees in homage to these words and never really stood upright again. Except, of course, when I read “Wild Geese,” and I’m told to stand up straight because, “the world offers itself to [my] imagination.” When a poem you love tells you how to live your life, my advice is simple: live your life the way the poem told you to live your life.
That’s what happened to me with “Lycidas.” I was finishing my fourth year of high-school Latin when I read it for the first time. That was over fifty years ago. During my third year of Latin, we read Cicero, and the guy who taught us was fresh out of a summer program at Oxford where he’d studied Milton. And he kept mentioning the poet in reference to Cicero, and that got under my skin because I’d never heard of him, and my teacher acted as though Milton were oxygen. His name was Mr. Fulton, a dull name that could suck the oxygen out of any high-school classroom, except that I loved the man because he loved a poet I’d never heard of, and I thought I was missing out on something.
It was my first case of literary FOMO. I’d asked Mr. Fulton during the Cicero class if he’d teach Milton the next semester. So he asked the principal who promptly nixed the idea because he said it didn’t fit my public high school’s curriculum. Which is shorthand for saying that the committees and regulatory boards that manage public education wouldn’t understand this odd request. Besides, it was the late sixties, and he was dealing with riots and desegregation in our high school. A seventeenth-century Puritan who was writing pastoral elegies probably weighed very little on the scale of justice that had landed on the stout desk of our beleaguered principal. Mr. Fulton agreed to teach me and another student Milton’s complete poetry and selected prose once a week in the evening at his house. He lived with his parents, and yes, they served us milk and cookies as we waded through the volume.
I was recently explaining this to Elizabeth, my fourteen-year-old daughter, as I picked her up from school. I was trying to make a stand for poetry camouflaged by a story about my high school days. She listened politely but then she saw that I was even boring myself.
So she interrupted and said, “Yeah, that’s cool, Dad. But we just had a fight in my last class.”
“Really?” I was happy to be off my soapbox.
“Yeah, this little guy I don’t even know threw an empty water bottle at this big kid on the other side of the classroom, and the big kid went totally rage-mode and threw his Chromebook back at the little guy, and it just shattered all over the place!”
“No way!” I use that phrase naturally now. To my daughter, it’s archaic, but it also has the charm of antiquity.
“Yes, and the teacher was like, ‘Whoa, guys, let’s calm down.’”
“Is that all the teacher said?”
“Yep, we had a substitute. She was clueless.”
It was mid-April, the afternoon was hot, too hot for mid-April, and the sun seemed to be in my face whichever way I turned as we headed home. I was edgy and uncomfortable because the sun wouldn’t leave me alone and because I had a seventeenth-century Puritan and a clueless substitute teacher occupying valuable space in my aging mind. So I collapsed them. I slid them into the same mental folder and labeled it “CLUELESS.” Clueless because the substitute teacher had no experience with flying Chromebooks, and I understood that; and clueless because I couldn’t explain my instant obsession with “Lycidas” when I was only a few years older than my daughter. And I didn’t understand that. So I saw right away that the Chromebook affair didn’t need my attention, but the poetry affair did. That lightened my load, and my happiness sprouted. I was OK with flying Chromebooks, but not with pastoral poetry.
As my happiness took root, my daughter plugged her phone in and started playing Zach Bryan’s song, “Overtime.” It’s a well written song about struggle, inherited disease, perseverance, and humility. She introduced me to Bryan after she’d had enough of Taylor Swift, and I like his stuff and didn’t miss the Swift era. When he sang the lines, “And I wanna stay humble, I wanna stay hungry,” she said she wanted to get a tattoo with those lines. I dodged the issue about when exactly her parents would let her make up her own mind about tattoos. I said instead that I hoped she stayed hungry, but that if things worked out for her, I also hoped that what came of that hunger wouldn’t go to her head. Hunger and satiation come with their own risks, and it’s good to know as much as you can about both conditions. I didn’t tell her that.
But I’d spent the morning with Milton, and I felt hung over. My eyes were burning from lack of sleep, but I honored my commitment anyway. On a green index card, I made a few brief notes as I reread “Lycidas.” I used the same book I used in high school, the one edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, copyright 1957, and weighing in at just over three pounds. It’s one of those books that couldn’t care less what you think about it. Hard-backed, of course, with blue boards and a black binding on the spine that proclaims you’re holding John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose edited by a guy named only “Hughes.” What’s on the front cover? Nothing. Back cover? Nothing. Do a simple Google search for a picture of Mr. Merritt Y. Hughes, and you get nothing. You do, however, get the feeling that the book and its author want to be left alone. Or that it knows what you know but won’t admit: you might not have the chops to read this poet. Or this: the stuff in here is nearly 400 years old; it doesn’t need to be read by the likes of you.
Here’s what I wrote on that green index card: “sadness,” “change,” “the church sucks,” “genius of the shore,” and “mic drop.”
“Lycidas” was written in 1637 in memory of Edward King, one of Milton’s classmates at Christ’s College, Cambridge. King was two years behind Milton, an Irishman, a promising clergyman, and a less promising poet. On a voyage home to visit his family in 1637, his ship struck a rock near the Welsh coast and King drowned. Pastoral elegies come with heavy baggage that makes reading them a chore: classical references everywhere, all kinds of requirements like catalogues of flowers and anything that makes you think of shepherds and sheep, and a grand conclusion that messes with your notion of “grand.” Because I’d suffered through four years of Latin in high school and remembered the classical mythology that my teachers drilled into me, when I first read this poem with Mr. Fulton, I had a pretty high hit rate with the obscure references. I felt two things to be true at once: first, hardly anyone could enjoy this poem because of its thick hedge of allusions, but I was getting along fine because I understood a lot of them quickly, and this arcane fluency went to my head.
After all, I’d landed in a country where I knew the native language and wanted more of it. Second, I was proud of my accomplishment, and during one very dangerous phase of my life—my late twenties, about the same age as Milton when he wrote the elegy—I used to claim that “Lycidas” was the greatest lyric in the language, and once I almost got into a fight about that claim late one night at a literary conference. Of course, alcohol was involved, but I loved the poem irrationally, and I bragged about my love of it annoyingly. I’ve stayed hungry for “Lycidas” all of my life, to bring Zach Bryan back into the conversation, but in the early days of my love affair, I wasn’t humble about it.
As I went through the poem, I felt again Edward King’s death and the tragedy of a young person lost at sea, but the poem never lets me stop there. I began to see death roaming through the world—even my driveway was littered with worms washed up by the recent storm and dried out by the bleaching sun. Milton knows how to walk down this never-ending alley of sadness, and I always followed him as if he held me at gunpoint. He also knows that when someone close to us passes away, our lives simply and unalterably change—“But O the heavy change, now thou art gone”—in ways we don’t really understand. And as long as he’s on the subject of being flummoxed by death, he goes after the pastors who’ve promised redemption, but become greedy and self-involved and aren’t tending to their flocks—a problem that has grown larger with each passing century.
These pastors, he wonders, what do they know anyway? Milton, seeing how easily a change can become a transformation, refashions King as the “Genius” of the shore, a guardian spirit for any future travelers that take to these troubled waters. It’s a shrewd move, I felt even when I first read the poem, because when death takes away those we love, we either transform the loss into a deeper understanding of those we love and who are still with us, or we walk around with another deep, black hole in our soul. I’ve done both and prefer the former over the latter, although holes in the soul are essential to understanding the great mess we’re capable of creating wherever we go. It’s a cold comfort, but it’s the best Milton and the rest of us can do in light of the evidence arriving from a cold world. Oceans tend to keep their secrets better than we do anyway.
In her English class, Elizabeth is reading Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” perhaps the most well-known and graphic poem to come out of World War I. In a nutshell, the poem takes the reader through the reality of war: dismemberment, disfiguration, blindness, poison gas, and of course indiscriminate slaughter. At the end, the poet reminds us to ignore the recruiting posters, to turn a deaf ear to the patriotic calls to serve your country.
“So, how do you like the poem?” I asked.
“It’s gross, and it’s boring because we have to count the metaphors.”
“Yeah, what’s a metaphor?”
“You know, Dad, that thing that uses ‘like’ or ‘as.’”
I couldn’t help myself. I corrected her. If I can’t control the onslaught of death, I can nail a figure of speech, dead to rights.
“OK, Dad, fine, a simile. Still, who cares?”
A fair question. And one that we ought to ask before we begin any poem and immediately after we finish it. There’s a treacherous gap between the first and last line of a poem we’re reading, and it is during this interval that the poem can either light up our nervous system or leave that system well enough alone. But to light up our nervous system, to strike a spark between the two darknesses of our beginning and our end—that might be the best we can hope for. “By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light,” writes Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Uncertainty, “between one eternal darkness and another.” But there’s more. “Nor is the interval between these two nights,” he continues, “an unclouded day, for the more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain—and, whether in the background or foreground, the pain is always with all feel this because we don’t truly understand our dying, and yet we don’t know precisely what to do about this predicament. We don’t have solutions. All we have is a raft of accommodating phrases to keep us afloat: have faith in this or that, love one another, declare the nothingness of it all, parade an embattled apathy, exercise a rigorous agnosticism, take shelter in all the other –isms. And we might also remember the opening lines of Vladmir Nabokov’s Speak Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Watts and Nabokov . . . that’s a powerful consensus.
Or maybe just count the metaphors. At least that way we’re forced to understand that we can’t find the words to describe what we see, to register what we feel, to find a way to say that just as there is much sweetness in every sunrise, in our own birth, so too we find a similar sweetness, or fitness, in the sunset, in the fact of our passing away. The best we can do is to use words in their figurative role and leave the meaning or, really, the feeling of the text up to the reader.
Besides, another thing is true that bears on what I’m trying to say. Put the book down that you’re reading and look out your window, as I am doing now. Here, the maples are leafing out, soon to reach their fullness; a very slight breeze moves through them. They are not shaking, they are not fluttering. I say the leaves are trembling. You see, I’ve put my book down. But I haven’t stopped reading. We are constantly monitoring the world around and within us, translating the solitary and raw experience of seeing a moving leaf into the shared and cooked gathering of words, “I say the leaves are trembling!” This movement from an isolated perception to a shareable community of words—call it a sentence—should not be taken for granted and overlooked. It’s a joyous process that defines us as a species.
These sentences can separate us, do their damage, and leave us wearied and alone.
But just as quickly they can bring us together and build a joy that is simply unconquerable. As Oliver reminds us, the world does, in fact, offer itself to our imagination. Every time we remember this little assessment, and act upon it, we strike a spark off the flint, and for that moment, the world is a little brighter.
In the last eight lines of “Lycidas,” Milton refers to himself as the “uncouth swain,” a moment of false humility, perhaps the greatest such moment in all of English literature. He knows what the previous 185 lines have delivered, and he’s proud of it. He should be. It’s a Mick Jagger, mic-drop moment that brings the poem to its end: “At last he rose, and twitch’t his Mantle blue; / Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.” He’s not done with death, this young poet, but for the moment he’s done what he could in the face of it. He created, in the time allotted to him, a record of a young man’s death and another young man’s response to it. What else can we do in the time that we have here? What else survives the interrogation of a skeptical world? The haughtiness, the life-giving haughtiness I feel in those last lines, arcs off his blue Mantle like a spark of light, and I see the world around me a bit more clearly for as long as the light lasts.
A thunderstorm had suddenly rolled in from Oklahoma. The rain was beating so hard on the roof of the car, I could barely hear Elizabeth complaining about counting the metaphors in Owen’s poem. She was right to complain, I thought, although I felt a kinship with her teacher who was trying to give her students a handle on the verse’s harsh magic by counting whatever could be counted, by tallying whatever could be tallied. And on those numbers, on that tally, a reader could stand and start to see what the poem really addressed: how eager we are at times to waste our lives, those brief sparks of light that we have been given, with soul-numbing and destructive diversions. Like war and loneliness and isolation. And, yes, even patriotism.
By the time we got home, the streets were flooded, and the storm showed no sign of stopping. We pulled into the garage. Suddenly, without the rain pounding on the roof, the world was silent. I wanted to sit in that silence with my daughter for as long as I could because I loved her beyond words. I wanted, I guess, to sit with her poised between the one eternal darkness of our beginning and the everlasting mystery of our ending.
“OK, Dad,” she said suddenly, “Can you grab my dance bag? I gotta go count those metaphors.” My daughter belongs to a local dance company, and dance is her obsession.
“Sure,” I replied. “It won’t take long, and then it’ll be over. It’s a short poem.” About the business of metaphor I was lying. We’re never done with trying to describe one thing in terms of another. One language expert claims that, “we utter one metaphor for every ten to twenty-five words, or about six metaphors a minute.” To me, that’s either madness or a miracle, and even on a good day, I can’t make up my mind which one has got hold of me. I’m happy to call our metaphor-making a miraculous madness and leave it at that. We make metaphors because we make lives we can’t describe with literal language. Life without metaphors might be impossible, but there are times when even they won’t do. There are times when, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “the music of what happens” is all we get.
Or all we need.
It didn’t take her long to count the metaphors, so I wasn’t lying about that, and her number was close to mine. Later, as I was getting into bed, I heard her dancing on the hardwoods in her room. I have no metaphors to describe what she was doing, but that’s not important. What is important, though, is how full of joy I was to know that she was dancing alone in her room, and dancing joyfully, and doing just fine without metaphors for a moment or two, suspended in air.
About the writer:
Sidney Burris’s essays have appeared in Five Points, Agni, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Sewanee Review, Contemporary Literature, and other journals. Three were in Best American Essays as Notable Essays (2002, 2004, 2008). He also teaches the practice of nonviolence, along with a Tibetan monk, to unruly college students.
Image: Dulce et Decorum (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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