IV.

FOCUS INTERPRETATION

PEIRCEAN HYPOICONS IN POETRY

At the level of Firstness, Peirce found possibilities—in a kind of miniature preconfiguration of the entire semeiotic—which fit the development of metaphorical Secondness and Thirdness. There is a first, second, and third kind of iconicity in possibility, distinguishing the imaginal, analogical, and metaiconic metaphors discussed in chapter 2.

I have argued in chapter 3 that poetic metaphorical similarity is grounded at least in positive possibility (kind 3, figure 3.3) and suggested that metaiconic similarity, as a metaphoric typology, is grounded in “irresistible” possibility (kind 4). I believe this describes metaphor in the epitome, as it comes into existence—the archetypal metaphor. Poetic tropes in which a metaicon is fully actualized go far beyond the level of metaphoricity achieved in metaphorical diagrams and images, and yet metaicons invariably contain diagrams and images. Indeed, the most powerful and successful poetic diagrams and images are spun from the overarching figural congruence of some metaicon. This chapter will further pursue the distinctions and hierarchical relations among the three kinds of metaphorical iconicity and explore some of their possible applications in poetry, concluding with a detailed application to a sonnet by Shakespeare.

First, consider again the Keats metaphor discussed in chapter 3: “[the stars are] diamonds trembling through and through.” The initial similarity between stars and diamonds is a clear example of the Peircean image in metaphor. The twinkling of stars and the glittering of diamonds are sensuously (optically) alike: They both have a sparkling quality. We may elaborate this quality if we choose, expanding the image into a diagram (stars / twinkle :: diamonds / glitter), but the elaboration merely explicates, in “slow motion,” as it were, our immediate apprehension of the link—sparkling or the like. If it were not for the immediacy of this simple sensory link between stars and diamonds, we would have great difficulty understanding that Keats is in fact talking about stars (which are never explicitly named in the passage).

However, there is no immediate or primary sensory linkage between the sparkling of the star-diamonds and the second icon, trembling. Though we may unconsciously experience the similarity as a unity, we cannot make explicit sense of it at the sensory level alone, for the connection is rather more abstract than the first. To make explicit sense of it (for purposes of analytical scrutiny), we need something like an analogical frame:

sparkling / light :: trembling / motion

Now if we require that all poetic metaphor consist of simple sensory likeness of some kind in order to be “clear,” this second part of Keats’s metaphor would probably fail for us. At the least, we would have to express a preference for the first parallel between stars and diamonds, which is certainly “clearer” from a strictly sensuous point of view. Yet it seems to me that sparkling-trembling is far more interesting than the star-diamond trope, and that not just because star-diamond is (now) a moribund metaphor. Rather, it is partly because star-diamond requires of us only a low-level sensory linkage, whereas sparkling-trembling drives us to conceive (at least unconsciously) of an analogical similarity quotient that transcends the mere sensations of diversity and captures (diagrammatically) the design features of energy in frozen motion (~). Keats’s diagram is as clear as any linguistic actualization of such a phenomenon can be; it is as lucid and accurate at its own level of abstraction as the much simpler image is at its level.

On the other hand, part of what makes the sparkling-trembling diagram clear is the star-diamond image embedded within it. After all, it is the initial star-diamond trope which first picks out—activates, or elevates to consciousness, as it were—the quality of sparkling or the like; without this quality in mind (as argued in chapter 3), there is no reliable ground for reconstructing the analogical extension by which “trembling through and through” is brought into the metaphorical complex. Thus the image and the diagram often work together in poetic metaphor, the image set succinctly within the larger diagram, lending concreteness and sensory immediacy to the diagram, just as the diagram contributes (ana)logical richness and breadth to the image. Given Peirce’s distinction between images and diagrams, then, we see how poetic metaphor often appeals to many levels of the mind simultaneously.

Examples of this complementary interplay between the first Firstness of the image and the second Firstness of the diagram are found everywhere in poetry; consider another example. Shakespeare’s Othello, requested by the Venetian Senators to delay his nuptials with Desdemona in order to undertake the Turkish war, responds:

Othello’s “flinty and steel couch of war,” though only part of a larger metaphorical complex, is itself a metaphorical complex—an image embedded inside a diagram. The image is “flinty and steel couch,” and the diagram is “couch of war.” Thus the two tropes are interlocked at couch, which at once signifies the object of the image and the icon of the diagram. Let us examine this reading in more detail.

Though it is of course possible to have a couch which is literally made of flint and steel, I take “flinty and steel couch” as a metaphorical image because I think Othello is speaking figuratively of a couch which—initially, at least—is intended to “feel hard” and to strike the immediate sense as uncomfortable. The subsequent lines lend support to this preliminary reading, both by the explicit mention of “hardness” (line 230) and by the oxymoronic contrast to “bed of down” (line 228). Though “flinty and steel couch” is a novel poetic image, it requires only slightly more mental effort to interpret, if any more at all, than the now moribund “iron fist”; both figures present a rather immediate imaginal connection, on grounds of a tactile quality (hardness or the like), from the icons (iron, flint, steel) to their respective objects. In the case of Shakespeare’s metaphor, the imaginal icon of flint and steel may also trigger additional associations of sparks and fire which contribute to the general sensory impression of discomfort in the object couch.

So constituted (hypostatically, as per chapter 3) as a “hardness” and “fieriness,” this couch-object becomes, in turn, a very fitting icon for the next object, war. Note, however, that there is no direct or immediate sensory justification for the comparison of war to any kind of a couch, a couch being a concrete object and war being a rather abstract phenomenon. The logic of this comparison therefore emerges only as an analogical proportion like the following:

flint-steel couch / other couches :: war / other occupations

Thus, the metaphorical image of a “flinty and steel couch” lends sensory immediacy and concreteness to the otherwise very abstract metaphorical diagram, “couch of war.” In return, the proportionality of the diagram increases the precision of the image and contributes analogical richness to it, for flint and steel not only seem hard and uncomfortable as couch material, but they also fit doubly well into the use of this couch as a diagrammatic icon for war, with the “hardness” of the couch having an analogue in the more abstract “hardship” of war, and with the “fiery” associations of flint and steel from the couch having a special application to the gunpowder and weaponry used in war.

Nor does this exhaust the functional complexity of the whole metaphor. After the (fiery) hardness of flint and steel has been hypostatically constituted in the couch, and after the couch in turn has been diagrammatically reconstituted as an analogue to war, then the entire construct (“the flinty and steel couch of war”) itself becomes the hypostatic object of one final icon, Othello’s “thrice-driven bed of down” (line 228). This final figure functions at both levels already established, thereby reinforcing the interplay: The word bed underlines the diagrammatic (ana)logic by which “war” is constituted as a couch, and the word down intensifies (by oxymoronic contrast) the sense of hardness and discomfort that arises from the image of flint and steel. The cumulative effect is that of a paradox, which of course is exactly what Shakespeare not only wants Othello to express but wants to express about Othello—an enigma of the hero’s character which is at the heart of the play: “A natural and prompt alacrity/ I find in hardness” (lines 229-230). While “poetic” (as a commentary on war) beyond its context, then, the metaphor also achieves a rich “dramatic” effect as a revelation of its speaker’s personality and its relevance to the play’s catastrophe. That is, Othello’s “alacrity” in the fiery hardness of war is perhaps part of what makes him ill-suited to the softness and leisure of Desdemona’s marriage bed.

Figure 4.1 illustrates the embedding of hypostatic results from one metaphor inside the predication of another, as the complexity of successive metaphorical diagrams is built up vertically around the horizontal polarity of opposed but parallel metaphorical imagery (flint-steel vs. down). To see how this “building up” takes place, read figure 4.1 from the bottom to the top.

Figure 4.1

As we will see at the end of this chapter in an extended example, this embedding of trope within trope within trope is rather typical of Shakespeare, and Peirce’s distinction between the hypoiconic image and diagram calls keen attention to the variety of levels on which complex metaphor functions. Further, the interplay of hierarchically nested metaphors in poetry is even more significant if Peirce’s provisions for yet a third level of iconicity are taken into account.

As I have argued in chapter 2, that third level of metaphoricity proper is the metaicon. Consider, as an example of this sort of archetypal metaphor, the sort of “master trope” out of which a seemingly endless series of fresh metaphors is continually spun in the language, especially in poetry. The example I have in mind is:

This well-known metaphorical archetype would seem to fit my reading of Peirce’s hypoiconic “metaphor” as metaicon rather well. Someone may object that it is a “dead” metaphor; I doubt it, but even if it is, I would add that its “decay” yields fertile ground for poets. Shakespeare used it in his Sonnet 73, “That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold” (extended discussion at the end of this chapter), and he was not the first to do so. Later, Thomas Hardy employed a “winter day” as the controlling metaphor for the death of love in his poem “Neutral Tones.” Such modern poets as e.e. cummings—hardly a purveyor of dead metaphor—have used it, as in his “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” where the cycle of seasons is a tacit metaphor for the monotonous circularity of life in “how town.” Archibald MacLeish (in “Ars Poetica”) offered a “maple leaf” (which, in conjunction with an “empty doorway,” is a striking though subliminal icon of the fall) as a figure for “the whole history of human grief.”

This is archetypal metaphor not merely because it is a recurrent figure in many poems but because there is a reason for its recurrence. The reason, in Peirce’s terms, is law (here serving as an iconic type). While law of course would include mere conventions (literary conventions, in this case, which make the metaphor a fully resonant symbol), Peirce’s notion of law is not limited to arbitrary convention (see CP 2.307). Indeed, what I have in mind as the “third Firstness” of law in possibility (the ground of the metaicon) is an antecedent final cause which motivates the literary convention enveloping the metaphorical archetype. Thus, the reason for the recurrence of the “seasons-life” metaphor in poetry is no mere accident of literary tradition. That is, I think it is not the case that some prominent poet just happened to invent it, whereupon it became popular and fashionable among poets. No, that explanation would negate the metaphor’s perennial fertility. Rather, the reason for its fertility is simply that both the seasons and the life cycle obey the same general law of change and perpetuity, the endless circle of germination, growth, flowering, seeding, withering, death, and decay, whence comes new germination. The parallel of all forms of life to the seasons is an inexhaustible source of fresh metaphor because the law in which the parallel turns is universal, teleological, and eternal.

It might be objected that any “dead” or “decayed” or “conventionalized” metaphor, even an image or a diagram, can be resurrected by a clever poet. This is true, but in the case of most metaphors, the resurrection is typically brought on through something like a twist or pun, as Shapiro and Shapiro show (1976: 20-21). There is no such cuteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, nor even in cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” Shakespeare, Hardy, and MacLeish also (in the poems noted above) freshen the seasonal metaphor by recasting it in novel contexts and by developing within it new images and diagrams, but it is still basically the same metaphor; its universality suggests novel contexts and implies new images and diagrams. Even when nothing in particular is done to embellish it—as in Shelley’s, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (“Ode to the West Wind”)—it resonates with echoes, not just of a long literary tradition, but of a universal and irresistible congruence.

Such a metaphor goes beyond images and diagrams, though countless such tropes may be cultivated from it without exhausting it. This is not to diminish the significant role of the image and diagram; on the contrary, the typological generality of the metaicon needs just the logic and energy of the diagram, and just the concrete and immediate sensory particularity of the image, in order for its full potential to be actualized in poetry. But we must be aware of this potential in the metaicon itself. It is of the nature of law, the governing and creative principle of perennial evolution. At the level of third Firstness, it is the seed of a poetic law; it must germinate (given the hospitable soil of a poetic culture), and once it does, it must grow as a powerfully creative symbol. Thus I am thinking of the metaicon as an antecedent but “determinate possibility” (among more “general possibilities”) in the creativity and growth of the poetic/symbolic archetype, much as Peirce described what “was the purpose” of all creation before the “influx of a symbol”:

A chaos of reactions utterly without any approach to law is absolutely nothing; and therefore pure nothing was such a chaos. Then pure indeterminacy having developed determinate possibilities, creation consisted in mediating between the lawless reactions and the general possibilities by the influx of a symbol. This symbol was the purpose of creation. Its object was the entelechy of being which is the ultimate representation. (NEM 4.262)

Unlike the metaphorical image, which (by itself) is only a salient likeness, or the metaphorical diagram, which (alone) is a significant proportion, the metaicon is an irresistible congruence that asks to be discovered and cannot but evolve into something richer and richer the more often it is re-discovered in poetry. Poets capture novel images and diagrams; but they do not capture the metaicon so much as they are captured by it. Such thoughts are not in us; we are in them, as Peirce would have it (CP 5.289 n. 1).

My intention here is not to make the metaicon sound like some sort of mystical poetic nirvana. On the contrary, I wish simply to point out that the metaicon has a natural and rational lawfulness, albeit a vague one (as possibility, and on the second sense of “vagueness” discussed in chapter 2). Its “vagueness” is its universal and powerful generality; its “naturalness” and “reasonableness” are displayed, I believe, in its symmetry. These attributes make it seem fitting to think of the actualized metaicon as instantiating a general “algebra” of poetic metaphor. Some readers may not like this suggestion, because they dislike the association of “logic” with language, and especially with creative literature. Nevertheless, my intent is to show that the laws of metaiconic logic create imaginative possibilities for poetry. As Peirce said, “A ‘rule’ in algebra differs from most other rules, in that it requires nothing to be done, but only permits us to make certain transformations” (MS 573: 2).

For instance, consider further the near-algebraic symmetry of the metaicon. Because of their symmetry (=), algebraic formulae are reversible; if I am correct that the metaicon is based upon a congruence (≅) which approaches such an equation, we also might expect to find that poetic archetypal metaphors are rather freely reversible. And in fact, they are. For instance, in the “seasons-life” archetype, the seasons may stand as the icon to signify the object of someone’s age or time of life, but time of life or age can also become an icon to signify an object in the seasons (figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2

Similarly, in the “wine-blood” metaphor, another perennial archetype which I believe has metaiconic status, we can have Bink Noll’s “last Bordeaux” for (dying) blood (Gordon 1973: 82-83, discussed in chapter 3), or we can have “the blood of the grape” for wine. Such metaphors are reversible, I believe, because their parallelism originally obtained, not just from themselves, but from a third element, a third Firstness, a seed of the symbolic embryo (though in these cases the “embryo” has already been born and has grown to great semantic stature in our literature); it is this which makes their parallelism teleological. Of course the symmetrical nature of these and similar parallels is “aided by convention,” as Peirce said of the algebraic icon (CP 2.279), but—unlike other “conventionalized” metaphors—they remain perennially fresh. Part of their freshness seems to obtain from fresh images and diagrams which poets are always developing within the overarching metaicons, but the way in which metaicons naturally lend themselves to such development is itself a function of their teleological symmetry: They are forever evolving because they revolve upon a pivot of law.

In any case, it is interesting to note that images (when they appear by themselves, outside the symmetrical matrix of a controlling metaicon) are, in general, not freely reversible. Some few images such as “stars-diamonds” are reversible after they are thoroughly lexicalized and moribund (for example, the Star of India), although this seems more of a “collapse” than a reverse, and even then imaginal metaphors tend to follow the general diachronic laws of unidirectional sense transfer (see Williams 1975: 207-211). These (apparent) facts have already been discussed in chapter 2 with respect to conversational metaphors of the imaginal and analogical kind.

Similarly, the poetic metaphorical diagram also seems irreversible. True, explicit verbal analogies are reversible. However, poetic metaphor of the analogical sort is an implicit analogy. The poet’s actual presentation of the analogy is characterized by an asymmetrical deletion of elements from the analogical frame, making it irreversible in most cases without change of sense or the explicit addition of terms (turning it into a simile). Moreover, poetic analogies typically predicate proportionality (::) across radically different semantic domains (more at chapter 5), making them even more asymmetrical. Most often, the direction of predication is from concrete tangible icon to abstract intangible object. This asymmetry makes reversing the direction of predication practically impossible, even if it were desirable.

Consider a diagrammatic metaphor discussed by Paul Henle (1958), John Keats’s metaphor of “the soul enwrapped in gloom.” As Henle shows, the metaphor is a diagram; but the analogical frame is characterized by an asymmetrical deletion of elements:

Because the object is fully explicit and because we have a morphemic fragment of the icon (-wrap), we can readily complete the frame with something like:

Of course the icon need not be specified precisely as a blanket or cloak covering a body; any provisional or crude icon will do, as long as it involves some concrete “wrap” around some concrete object. The metaphor makes the rather abstract “soul in gloom” situation more vivid and tangible for us precisely by offering a concrete iconic model of it.

But suppose we try to reverse the icon and object roles in this metaphor. That is, suppose a body wrapped in a blanket—instead of being a subliminal, provisional icon—had been Keats’s precise (but implicit) object. And suppose, in order to indicate this precise object, he had to use only “the soul in gloom” as an icon. It is difficult to see how he might use such an abstract, intangible thing for a “model”—even though all terms of it are explicit—to make us imagine, precisely, a body wrapped in a blanket or cloak. Abstract and immaterial phenomena like the soul in gloom do not serve well as icons, even with all terms explicit, to signify concrete objects like a body in a wrap. Conversely, concrete icons, even if they are implicit and fragmentary like “-wrap / [ ],” serve very well to signify abstract or insubstantial objects. Apparently, then, implicit concrete icons are readily reconstructible from explicit abstract objects in poetic metaphor of the diagrammatic sort, with only a modicum of contextual cueing. But the reverse is not true. Unnamed concrete objects cannot be reliably reconstructed from abstract or intangible icons, not even from fully explicit ones, and no matter how elaborate the contextual design. Therefore, unlike the metaicon, the poetic diagram is not generally reversible or reciprocal (unless, as we will see, it is generated from and enveloped by the symmetrical matrix of a controlling metaicon).

This constraint on diagrams seems to accord with some general diachronic laws of linguistic change. As Bloomfield has put it (1933: 429-430), “The surface study of semantic change indicates that refined and abstract meanings grow out of more concrete meanings.” Bloomfield is correct to call this a conclusion from “surface study” only, for as we will observe in chapter 7, semantic growth—via the metaicon, in fact—is in exactly the reverse order, namely from abstract to concrete. Nevertheless, prior to the entelechy of a metaiconic system in the language (the elaboration of which system, I believe, is often one of the principal debts owed by a language to its creative literature), then semantic growth must be according to Bloomfield’s “surface” law: from concrete to abstract, or as I would say, from concrete iconic image, towards abstract metaicon, via diagrammatic or analogical extension. Needless to say, such growth from concrete to abstract could not occur except for the fact that the image, and especially the diagram, represent asymmetrical “leaps upward.” In the case of poetic images and diagrams, these are often “quantum leaps”—a condition of exaggerated asymmetry, making the images and diagrams even more non-reciprocal and irreversible.

When such leaps attain a genuinely metaiconic level, however, they represent connections which approach an ultimate condition of pure symmetry between icon and object (thus icon-icon), like two mirrors turned to face one another, as it were, with the consequent infinite proliferation of self-reflexive figures at the interface. Thus the metaicon is (nearly) reversible to the full “algebraic” extent, whereby it suggests an unending plenitude of fresh images and diagrams. As will be discussed further in chapter 7, actualized metaicons are thus the vehicles of a prolific and accelerated form of growth—not only in literature, but in language, culture, and cognition.

What is more important in this predominantly synchronic study of metaphor, however, is that the symmetrical congruence of the metaicon is what lends both elements of the archetypal poetic metaphor an immediate sense of permanently growing significance. A successful realization of the blood-wine metaicon, for instance, brings us to see both blood and wine in a new way, with a new value and meaning. (The Roman Catholic doctrine of wine-blood—or of bread-flesh—transubstantiation ought not really be surprising or shocking, even to the most ardent disbeliever, in view of the power of such metaicons.) Similarly, in a poem like Shakespeare’s “That Time of Year . . . ,” as we will see presently, the “life-seasons” metaicon is not merely a mechanism for naming the intangibles of old age, but a reciprocal relation that encourages us to think about the cyclical nature of time, whereby we come to view both the human life cycle and the seasons in a poignantly new way, to discover something of that order which unites man and the cosmos. Whereas novel images and diagrams are powerful expressions of the poet’s world view, metaicons control, shape, and reshape the world view. Rooted in the potentiality of law, they grow, reciprocally.

In poetry, novel images and diagrams also sometimes foster such new perceptions, rather than simply naming their objects; but the growth of new meaning they evoke is usually very transitory, a provisional expansion only within the special world of the poem. I believe this is partly due to the fact that images and diagrams are not freely reversible (by themselves). Indeed, one of the best ways to illustrate just how powerful a provision this reversibility is in the metaicon is to show how inappropriately distorted it renders a poem based mainly on simple poetic images. For instance, in the first line of Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales” (1962: 35), we read “Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees . . . .” The image captures the optical condition precisely. We see the apish “squatting” of Sweeney—with the “apeneck” jutting of the head forward—and that is all, I think. The animal imagery, a whole series of brilliant surrealistic metaphors creating a pervasive sense of depravity in the world of the poem, is nevertheless just that: a poetic instantiation of hypoiconic imagery. It seems to belabor the poem a little even to expand this imagery into a diagram like

Sweeney / other bar patrons :: ape / lower species

since nothing that elaborate is worked out in the poem (though it may indeed be suggested). Even if the poem’s graphic imagery can be usefully expanded to a diagram, no clear metaicon emerges from it, in my view. For instance, a college student of mine probably went too far in “reversing” the metaphors, reading the traits and behavior of the humans in the poem as a running commentary upon relations in the animal kingdom, which he saw as the real object. Eliot, the student insisted, was really demonstrating the “universal law of Darwinian Evolution”; the human social interactions in the bar were actually an “allegory of natural selection in biological theory.” I think the student was (creatively) over-reading the poem, outdoing Eliot. He was in fact reading its figural content as a metaicon when I think he should have been content with it as a powerful series of striking images which depict, not all of nature, but the special world of Sweeney and his degenerate companions.

With true metaicons, the more frequent interpretive mistake is under-reading. In Shakespeare’s sonnet below, for instance, the general law of the cyclical nature of time is the principle which governs the parallelism of every metaphor employed. We ought therefore to resist the habit of reading the metaphors in one direction only, from icon to the discovery of “object.” Rather, the icons and “objects” should be read as joint signs of one another, as reciprocal tokens of the same universal type. Shakespeare exploits this reciprocity for its potent generality and for its generative potential: Fresh images and diagrams thus abound, offering elaborate development and subtle variety to a single grand theme performed in four major movements—four distinct yet interrelated metaicons.

The grand theme is of course the cycle of life, which begins in youth and ends in death. Shakespeare builds this theme in four movements by drawing upon the poetic and dramatic power of four metaicons which might be generalized as follows:

All four of these fit my reading of Peirce’s “metaphor” as metaicon. All four are recurrent figures in creative literature and in the linguistic culture because they all possess nearly universal breadth, and yet they maintain a perennial fertility, not just encompassing but generating a myriad of particular images and diagrams. In each case, the overarching figural congruence is very nearly symmetrical and reversible. The diagrammatic and imaginal extensions which Shakespeare builds within these master tropes lend their controlling metaphors a sensory immediacy and a logical certitude.

Peirce’s hierarchical hypoiconic structure, when applied to this poem, calls keen attention not only to the elaborate variety of tropological instruments which Shakespeare brings into harmony, with images appealing to the immediate sense or feeling and diagrams to the aesthetic logic of proportion, but also to Shakespeare’s genius for embedding one trope inside another, generating one from another, exactly as Peirce’s diagram may subsume the image and as the metaicon subsumes them both. Peirce’s sense of isomorphic structure within structure within structure is what makes his theory especially sensitive to the analytical interpretation of poetic metaphor, a kind of analysis which, far from doing any violence to the whole, actually encourages a more holistic reading. The following exercise in completing Shakespeare’s metaphoric diagrams, for instance, even if my versions of these are inaccurate, may lead us to consider possibilities in the poem that we might otherwise have missed.

First, Shakespeare’s opening line, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” more than initiates the first metaicon of “life-season” (specifically, “agedness-autumn,” as we soon learn); his wording of it also reminds us that this metaicon is a congruence, not a mere correspondence: A is not merely beside or like B, but A is actually “in” B. (Note that Shakespeare uses the same “A in B” predication in the first line of each of the three quatrains to announce the controlling metaphor for that stanza.) Thus the autumn is not merely a mechanism for designating the poet’s time of life, but a kind of axiomatic truth-condition by which the typological metaphorical qualities of the icon autumn are accorded the status of a controlling first principle. We see not two things side by side but two things in one; we see the unnamed and sublimated object, old age, as belonging to the same whole to which the icon of autumn belongs. Thus we are asked to view the aging process, despite its poignant sadness and the approach of death (winter), as a thoroughly natural thing, just another sign of the cycle of time, full of pathos but utterly devoid of tragedy. No, the poem does not gush with sentimental euphemisms (as some lesser poet might have written: “the mellow joys and beauties of the autumnal age”); quite to the contrary, the poem’s metaphors portray the fall as a time of harsh, painful realities. But the poet does not whine about getting old either. Very subtly, he betrays a profound acceptance of a natural and universal law, the turn of the seasons in his own life.

The subtlety of this acceptance, which nicely represses any distracting pretension to heroism or martyrdom on the poet’s part, arises from his quiet presentation of the icon autumn inside the object frame—the specifics of his physical condition. Now in ordinary metaphors, the usual configuration is to place a “provisional” icon alongside the “true” object; this may lead or allow the interpreter to focus on the object itself in the pursuit of the “truth.” Shakespeare, however, exploits the unique symmetry of the metaicon to reverse (or to negate) this polarity, bringing the icon of autumn into primary position as an object in itself, thus implying that we can only understand old age (the anticipated object) by first understanding autumn as a true instance of the aging process.

This reversal colors the truth, but it does not soften it; the diagrams in the rest of stanza one squelch any suspicion that the autumn-icon is meant to glorify or sentimentalize old age. In three successive lines we have three diagrams:

few leaves I boughs :: [few hairs?] / (limbs of body?]

bare boughs / [tree] :: ruined choir / [church]

departed birds / bare boughs :: departed singers / ruined choir

The sublimated objects of the second and third frames above suggest two further extensions:

ruined choir / [church] :: [broken voice?] / (body?]

lost singers / ruined choir :: [lost lyricism?] / (broken voice?]

Perhaps some of these extensions go too far. There are for me, however, at least some faint hints of Shakespeare’s fear that the muses which once “sang sweetly” in himself (who was merely their habitation) may now have forsaken him in his old age. In any case, whatever we take the prerogatives to be for constructing the implicit objects of Shakespeare’s extended and interlocking diagrammatic icons, the salient point is that these implicit objects (the poet’s conditions of life and limb) are rather deliberately sublimated by the fronted elaborateness of the iconic structure. While the icons are all harsh and painful, avoiding any temptation to meliorate the speaker’s condition, the sublimation of that condition again calls attention to the fact that the Law of the Seasons, and not the poet’s private complaint, is the interpretive key. Shakespeare’s patron/addressee would no doubt already have known the details of the poet’s condition. The poem serves the addressee’s needs (as well as our own) by reinterpreting the pains of growing old not merely as a parallel to the autumn but (because of the reversed metaicon, containing diagrams whose objects are left implicit) as an actual single instantiation of autumnal changes. When the human condition is subordinated in this way to the condition of time and season, we come to see the human condition in a totally new light; and that new “light” itself (the season itself) begins to take on a growing significance, offering—if not comfort—at least an acceptance of things at last correctly understood. Such an understanding is necessarily metaiconic.

Images in the first stanza contribute a varied harmony to this theme. The fading or whiting of the speaker’s hair is perhaps imagined as “yellow leaves.” Those for whom visual precision is the be-all and end-all of poetic metaphor will not like this; they will reject the image as fanciful, or the suggestion that it is an image of fading hair, because they want an image to show them what they already know the object looks like—in this case, probably white or gray. Perhaps the image, despite its sensory appeal, does border on the analogical. But the important point (as I have argued in chapter 2) is that there is a continuum of iconicity from the imaginal up through the analogical to the metaiconic. Because the metaicon which controls the yellow-leaves-to-faded-hair connection has already been clearly established in the poem, “yellow leaves” possesses a truthfulness and accuracy transcending mere visual precision. That is, we should remember that hair turns white or gray (and sometimes yellowish) in older people for basically the same reason that the leaves of a tree turn color in the fall. Shakespeare’s purpose is not just to have us guess that “yellow leaves” implies “faded hair”; he wants us to see faded hair in shades of autumn, and to see shades of autumn in faded hair—that is, to truly understand the universal aging processes of nature.

Is the “shaking” of the “boughs” against the “cold” a triple image of an old man’s clammy, palsied limbs? I think so, but the question almost misses the point. In view of the controlling metaicon, it would be better to say that the chilling loss of circulation and the loss of muscular control in the limbs of an older person really are, in the global scheme of things, of little more private significance than the shaking of a barren tree in the chilly wind. It is not a pretty picture, but it is true. The truth of such an image is not the explicitness of the object, but the implicit universality in terms of which the image (embedded in its metaicon) re-interprets the object.

By way of contrast, I recall the cry of Shakespeare’s aged King Lear, tearing off his clothes in the storm because he has at last come to know that “unaccommodated man” is only a “poor, bare, fork’d animal” in the cold. Here in this sonnet, though, there is no cry, but only a quiet resignation to the ultimate truth of the same figure, subtly insinuated by the subordination of the human object to the global icon of seasonal imagery. This emphasis on the truth of the imaginal icon thus harmonizes perfectly with Shakespeare’s development of the typology in the controlling metaicon: Because the terrestrial phenomenon of the seasons is larger than man, man’s changes as configured by that larger phenomenon point higher still to a third thing, the lawfulness and reasonableness of it all. Lear in the storm understood the analogy; Shakespeare in old age—after the storm had passed—understood the “metaphor.”

The sonnet’s second stanza recapitulates and develops the same theme in a new key, a minor key but at a quickening tempo: the metaicon of life-day. The movement to a shorter time frame (from the basic unit of a season to that of a day) implies that time is growing shorter for the poet. Nevertheless, the shift is unobtrusive, hardly noticeable at all if the quatrains are not separated on the page. More important, Shakespeare once again reverses the polarity of the congruence, fronting the icon of “twilight” into a role as object and asking us to view the (still unnamed and sublimated) other signs of time (advancing age) through that illuminating perspective. The imagery harmonizes perfectly, for we next discover that this stage of twilight is “after sunset fadeth,” which perhaps signifies the loss of sanguine color in the old man’s pallid complexion. Even when twilight gives over completely to “black night,” an extension of the controlling metaicon (day-life > twilight-agedness > night-death), the cumulative impression is that this turn of events in the life of man is no more shocking or individually important than the passage of a given day into night. The effect is not euphemistic; “black” night is perhaps frightening, certainly total and unequivocal. But the sublimation of the object (death) suggests that the truth of death really is its iconic typification, via objectification, in night.

In the very next line, the apparent actual or literal object surfaces for the first time in the poem. This “object” is also the final “objective” (in time) to which all the metaphors in the poem are leading—death. No sooner does the word death explicitly surface as a “final” object(ive) of all these icons, however, than it is immediately negated as such by being embedded inside yet another icon—“Death’s second self,” which is an icon for night (reinforced, perhaps, by an association of night and sleep). Thus not even the word “death” in this poem refers to death as a peculiar phenomenon fit to be considered as a (final) object unto itself; death is here only part of a larger construct, a larger Sign, whose Interpretant is “rest.” In the larger scheme of things, rest is the general type of which both death and night are but two joint tokens.

Metaphoric truth is larger than our preconceptions of literal fact in this poem. This “truth” is the sense of “converging significance” inherent in the metaicon of death-night The usual interpretation of the associated analogy (death / life :: sleeping / waking) is a great mistake, I believe. It is usually interpreted only as a diagram, in which the icon sleep is merely made analogous to the “true” object, death. But Shakespeare has it right; he exploits the unique reciprocity of the metaicon, which is the analogy’s ultimate ground, to make death itself (the expected object) into a sign, part of an icon, which is itself part of “something else,” to use Peirce’s words.

Again, what is this “something else”? It is Law. We in the twentieth century, with our powerful telescopes and ability to travel in space, ought not to have to be reminded that the prevailing law or norm of space is exactly as Shakespeare saw it nearly four hundred years ago—“black night,” that “seals up all.” In this way of looking at the universe, the trillions of stars, enclosed and dwarfed as they are by a pervasive hegemony of infinite black nothingness, are but minute “exceptions” to the universal rule of darkness. Why should this unending black vacuum—being so lawful—frighten us so? Only because, in our narrow view of things beneath the tiny star which is our sun, we have come to look upon “light” and “life” as the norms, to which cosmic darkness and death thus appear to be strange, disconcerting aberrations. Shakespeare, I mean to suggest, saw beyond this narrow view. If we are prepared to read the significance of his sonnet in such a way as to appreciate not just poetry but life more fully, we must look beyond our animal-human fear of cosmic darkness and death to see these facts as they really are: utterly commonplace, natural, normal, lawful.

With such a norm or law in mind, we are not likely to misread Shakespeare’s use of the metaicon of death in terrestrial night as a euphemistic analogy that might pleasantly obscure the truth of being sealed up in universal blackness. For just as the approach of terrestrial night really is, quite literally, the turn of cosmic darkness around half our little world at a time, so dying really is a return of the the life-energy to that actual state of inertia that circumscribes all motion (“. . . and our little life rounded with a sleep”—Prospero, The Tempest, probably Shakespeare’s last play). This is the rule of “rest,” in Shakespeare’s wording, to which the work of a lifetime—if only we could see things as they really are—is but a momentary exception. (It is this fact which makes life exceptional.) To characterize this “rest” as “sleep” (our provision; Shakespeare called it the “seal” of “Death’s second self”) should therefore not permit us to “sweeten” death in this poem with the prospect that we shall individually awaken from it. Perhaps we shall, but that is not what the poem says. It does not say, “Death is only a short night,” the usual misreading of the death-night metaicon; it rather says the reverse, that night is death’s second sign. Night does not obscure death here; it is supposed to remind us of it. And while this reminder does not offer the hope of a supernatural, it implies that death is no more peculiar or private an affair than is darkness or inertia. It therefore offers only whatever comfort may come from a correct understanding of a universal and natural law embodied in metaphoric truth. We may fully appreciate this truth only if we understand that the icon (night) is not a substitute for the object (death), but that they are jointly signs of one another, and that their reciprocal parallelism subsists not in the mind of the poet or reader, but in the “converging significance” of a thirdness which transcends both them and us.

In the next stanza, however, as if to depict one last feeble attempt to counteract the gathering shadows which have grown to black night in only eight lines, Shakespeare turns from death to life again, initiating the final and climactic metaicon:

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

or

life ≅ fire

For a moment, perhaps, there is hope for light and warmth against the dark cold, but to Shakespeare’s truth-seeking imagination, the icon of fire is a changing thing, not a static image upon which to anchor false hopes; like everything else in the poem, fire exists in time, takes its essential qualities from the universal laws of time and cyclical change. It is this truth about fire—not its light and warmth—that captures Shakespeare’s imagination and leads him once again to reverse the sign polarity, bringing the expected icon of fire forward as an object in itself, fit to be turned over and over in imaginative time and space to see what further mysteries of life it reveals. Shakespeare’s shift into the climactic new key of this fourth and final metaicon is therefore in perfect (though varied) harmony with the whole poem. True, his mind seems to be following the ordinary animal-human process of associative need (perhaps the same “need” which draws insects to a light in the darkness also led primitive man to build his first fires), but the true unity of the “fire-life” metaicon with the rest of the poem derives from the status Shakespeare discovers fire to hold as both an object and a sign of time law (the type of which but another token is life-time).

The diagrammatic developments which Shakespeare builds within this overarching frame all turn upon an ironic truth about time: Time must run out in order to come to its fullness; a fire must burn down before one gets ripe coals; one must die in order to live—the life process is also the process of death. This is a truism of common proverbs, of course, but the energy and rather rigorous (ana)logic of Shakespeare’s interlocking diagrams rescues the truth from truism (lines 10-11):

fire [flame] / ashes :: youth / [decimation of old age]

ashes / glowing [coals] :: deathbed / [life force]

In order to experience the fire of life, the exuberant blaze of youth, something must be burned as fuel. The fuel, of course, is the body and its very life force, decimating itself in the very expression of itself. The result of life-fire is clearly two-fold in Shakespeare’s formulation: “ashes” and “glowing” [coals].

Ashes may be taken as an image within the diagrams—a sensory likeness, perhaps, to the wrinkled, ashen skin. But it is not merely an image; it is an image within a diagram within a metaicon, whereby the ashes left from a fire are not just sensuously “like” the decimated skin; they really are an instance of the same type of (chemical) results of oxidation which, in the carbon cycle of life, appear as signs of old age. Science and poetry are but different modes of discovery, often of the same truths. Of course, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare was drawing upon his knowledge of chemical oxidation. But neither am I allowing that he just happened to have got the metaphor right. Perhaps he knew nothing about pyrochemistry or about organic hydroxyls. But what he must have known—and known as a truth transcending both science and metaphor—is that fire ≅ life and life ≅ fire. It is precisely this reciprocal congruence, no mere accident of literary convention, which makes the image of “ashes” ring so true for us today; the law creates the image and gives it perennial relevance.

Shakespeare, however, gets double duty from this image. Ashes not only parallel the decimated body in the first analogy, but they parallel “deathbed” in the second. What lies on this “bed” is the fire at its present stage of life—“glowing,” which I take to be glowing coals. All is not yet ashes; a few embers of life remain. What do these embers parallel in the completed second analogy?

The glowing coals could not logically represent the decimated body, since the body is the ashes on which the glowing coals lie. I therefore have taken the coals to represent something like the “life force” or the spirit, the life-fire distilled down to its very essence. I hope I am not going too far to suggest that one does not get coals—not ripe or “glowing” ones—except at the end of a rather hot fire. This reading would seem to be suggested by the final line of this quatrain: “Consumed with that which it was nourished by.” One must have a hot fire in order to “nourish”—nurture or cultivate—a good bank of coals; but the hotter the fire, the more quickly its whole cycle is over, and even the coals are “consumed” by what nurtured them into being. A long, slow, smouldering fire will last longer, but it never comes to that final ripeness of glowing coals. There is thus the faintest hint that the poet does not regret the fire through which he has passed and which has brought him to bodily decimation, for it has also nurtured in him a full and early maturity of spirit and understanding. The final irony of this “wheel of fire” (to borrow another expression of King Lear) is that fact that now—when the human spirit has been brought to its fullest appreciation or understanding of life, and is itself reduced to the very essence of the life force—now, the “glowing” spirit has only a decimated body for its place, a bed of ashes in which to lie and expire.

With that one word expire (line 11), Shakespeare brings together, in a triple diagram, the unifying principle of the fire-life cycle at its final end:

expire₁expire₂expire₃

fire / burns out :: life / dies out :: lungs / breathe out

It is no surprise that words like expire develop such different (and yet somehow the same) senses in the language, or that poets like Shakespeare exploit such words for their compression of different meanings into one. What is more interesting is the question of what semeiotic principle fosters and governs the metaphoric growth of such linguistic meanings. When words like expire, originally meaning to “breathe out,” acquire additional senses such as “burn out” or “die” or “terminate” (as when a lease expires), surely it is no accident or mistake or arbitrary usage which just happens to catch on. True, “mistakes” or arbitrary idiomatic codes are often adopted as convention—examples abound in the study of slang and jargon—but for the most part these are short-lived in the language and are usually restricted to usage among linguistic or cultural subgroups. Only those “mistakes” or seemingly arbitrary innovations which we all somehow recognize as serendipitous tend to catch on and to survive for long. What makes them seem “serendipitous”? Many things, perhaps, but Shakespeare’s use of the word expire suggests one possible explanation: Could it be that the figurative extensions from the original meaning of expire naturally arose and continue to survive in accordance with a metaiconic “final cause” of something like “breath ≅ life ≅ fire”? I suspect that Peirce would have been amenable to the idea. Though it is certainly beyond the scope of this study (except for some brief suggestions in chapter 7), perhaps linguists would do well to investigate the diachronic life cycle of such figurative extensions in the language not just as linguistic, psychological, or sociological phenomena but as semeiotic patterns having a broader basis in nature.

At any rate, Shakespeare’s use of expire is more than just clever diction or the exploitation of linguistic convention. True, by the time of Shakespeare, expire had probably already acquired its euphemistic usage for “die.” But his attribution of it, not to the literal object of death but to the fire-icon of life points us back to the original meaning of the word—“to breathe out,” in the sense of “to breathe out one’s last breath.” In the history of the word, that latter sense was probably the allowing condition by which expire was adopted as a euphemism for “die” (see O.E.D 931). Shakespeare’s reversal of the metaiconic sign-object roles, however, along with his embedding of a triple diagram interlocking upon expire, strips the euphemistic convention away, and we almost hear the dying man’s last breath, in the hiss, perhaps, of an extinguished flame. The fact that this “exhaust” of life is sublimated and subordinated to the icon of a dying fire not only makes the metaphor more psychologically effective; it also puts life and death into a new, but quite proper and correct, perspective.

Thus Shakespeare has brought us in three quatrains from the time of old age, when still a season remains, through the day of death, when only a few moments of twilight remain, down now to this final instant of breath. Note that the “space” frame also narrows from stanza to stanza—from the global icon of the seasons, to the narrowing hemisphere of light on the western horizon, to the confinement of the deathbed, with the shadows closing in around the dying fire. In harmony with the narrowing time frame from stanza to stanza, there is thus an increasing though sublimated sense of spatial claustrophobia, reinforcing the suggestion of a last breath. In Peirce’s terms, then, this whole poem becomes a sign; that is, its very stanzaic structure, narrowing in space and time, becomes an icon of the fact that the poet’s season, and now day, and now span of breath, are approaching an end. Even this “stanzaic icon,” though, is part of a reversible metaicon: The other side of spatial-temporal “claustrophobia” is intimacy, which surfaces as a beautiful climax in the final couplet’s tacit request and explicit thanksgiving for the reader’s love: “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,/ To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” Because of the poem’s metaiconic frame, it is not just the poet we must love; it is life itself we must love—for that we, too, “must leave ere long.”

We do not need Peirce’s notion of the hypoicons in order to appreciate Shakespeare’s consummate metaphorical patterning. However, Peirce’s formulation of “metaphor,” as I read it, allows us to make explicit our sense of this sonnet as a structural and thematic unity. Not only does Peirce’s theory of the hypoicons call keen attention to the elaborateness of Shakespeare’s embedding of one kind of trope within another (appealing to all levels of the mind simultaneously), but it gives us a way of explicating the poem’s cumulative effect. Most importantly, Peirce’s notion of law in which the symmetry and “converging significance” of the metaicon obtain, I believe, encourages us to reconsider our lives in relation to the actual and general laws of time and space, which are the ultimate vision of this poem. In the light of Peirce’s ideas, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 reflects much more than his ingenious exploitation of literary and linguistic convention. Rather, it reflects his adherence to a universally true semeiosis, of which his masterful creation and his genius itself are but an accurate Sign and Interpretation.