Today felt like a lazy, fluffy cat sunning itself, its luxurious tail lilting this way and that. Today fairly purred. I just wanted to lay around in it, drifting off to sleep, with silence playing in the background.

Today, I got to thinking about metaphor. Metaphor is a comparison. It’s saying that one thing is like another. Sometimes it’s saying that one thing is another, but one realises that it’s a poetic way of putting things. One thing is not actually another, but one thing so closely resembles another that to speak as if it were carries the emphasis.

Then again, poetry is not prose is it? Poetic expression communicates in spite of itself. I am sometimes amazed at how the feeling of the words seems to become more important than the content they bear.

Consider this:

Demure and proper

Shy and still

Still young and wild

But quiet till

The fire began to burn Her soul.

Then white lace

And pastel pink

Gave way to denim rags

And rouge.

To think that she was just a girl

Like sleet on snow.

One finds oneself asking, “What does it mean?”

And yet, it seems to mean something almost in spite of itself. Perhaps it means something different to everyone. Maybe there’s enough space inside of it that you can roam around with your own images, your own history, your own imagination about young girls coming of age.

But in what way are they like sleet on snow? I don’t know, but I know that sleet on top of snow feels abrasive to me.

Sleet feels driven and hard, but snow feels fluffy and light. Snow feels good, and sleet feels kind of nasty.

Okay, maybe that’s it. We’re just supposed to ponder it and feel those words a bit. To walk around in the metaphor until the total effect takes over.

I once read an author who was pointing out that poetry has an emotional correlate in the metaphor as well as a more descriptive, straightforward meaning. One thing is being compared to the other in order to communicate, but along the way the emotional tone of the metaphor also communicates, and that is often somewhat misunderstood. I can say, for instance, that I was surprised by a gift of flowers and I can say I was surprised by a shotgun blast.

These both convey the idea of surprise, but the aesthetic of shotguns is quite different from that of flowers. This difference is also often a gender distinction. Men often miss the emotional correlate in what they are trying to explain, while women long for it.

We may all speak the language of love, but in relationships, women speak it in one dialect and men speak it in another. That is, of course, a generalisation. However, it’s a common observation in my practice as I meet with people trying to understand how, when they both want to give and receive love, they could be missing one another so badly.

It’s because the emotional correlate is not a match.

Men need to take poetry lessons. They need to learn how to bring the emotional tone of their language into line with their more factual, straightforward expressions. Consider how romantic it is to tell someone, “Our love is like a tractor”.

Now, there was a country song awhile back in which some guy was ecstatic because some woman loved his tractor, but I think that unless “tractor” stood for something more explicitly masculine, it might just have been a stupid song.

I don’t know too many women who would “get it” if you told them your love was like a tractor. You might mean strong and sturdy, but she might just think dirty and grimy.

When the emotional tone syncs up with the factual content, then effective communication takes place. Without this, people get confused, or they just are left disinterested, and sometimes what gets communicated seems simply offensive.

All this also harmonises with the saying that it’s not what you say but how you say it that matters so much. Well, that’s something to contemplate As you go on your way.

The words we utilise

Are half what we say.

So, pick up your jaw

And don’t look so surprised

The emotional correlate

Is a word for the wise.