A Guide to the Understanding

of English Poetry

(Continued)

4.2 Metonymy and Synecdoche

4.2.1 Metonymy

    In a metonymy, the name of a person, institution, or human character, is substituted by that of another object or quality which is clearly associated with it, as when a King or Queen may be referred to as the ‘Sceptre and Crown’ and the humble peasantry referred to as ‘poor crooked scythe and spade’ in the following lines:

Sceptre and Crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

(James Shirley: The Levelling Dust)

    In the following lines from A Song: Men of England by G. G. Byron, "cradle", "grave", and "drones" represent respectively "birth", "death" and "parasitic lords":

Wherefore feed, and clothe and save,

From the cradle to the grave,

Those ungrateful drones who would

Drain your sweat, nay, drink your blood.

    The advantage of metonymy in poetry lies in its conciseness and vividness. By using "cradle", "grave”, and "drones", the images are more concrete, and the life of the parasitic lords is emphasized.

There are different types of metonymy, and following are some of them:

1/ The name of body part for the sense, behavior, or ability

We need more hands (“hands” for persons) (also see “Synecdoche”)

2/ The name of a person for his or her works or style:

It is somewhat difficult for many of us to read Shakespeare. (“Shakespeare” for his works)

3/ The name of a clear sign of an object, or a person as a name for the object or the person:

The thirteen colonies got together to fight the red lobsters.

(“the red lobsters” for British soldiers in the 18th c.)

4/ The name of a place as a name for something produced or some event that happened there:

He met his Waterloo.

 (“Waterloo”, a place where Napoleon was decisively defeated there.)

5/ The name of an instrument or container as a name for the method, position, or substance.

a/ The pen is mightier than the sword.

(“The pen” for writings and “the sword” for fighting.)

b/ He was too fond of the bottle.

(“the bottle” for alcoholic drinks it contained.)

6/ The name of location as a name for the government, institutions or enterprises.

 Fleet Street can make or break a politician.

 (“Fleet Street” is the area in London where most of the important newspaper offices are. The street name comes from a river, and now the name represents British press)

    There is another kind of metonymy which is termed “transferred epithet”. It is a device of emphasis in which the poet attributes some characteristic of a thing to another closely associated with it:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

 

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

(From Thomas Gray’s Elegy: Written in a Country Churchyard)

    When Thomas Gray writes "The plowman homewards plods his weary way" and " drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds", he well knows that it is not the "way" that feels "weary", nor the tinkling bells that "drowse", but the plowman or the country folks who fell weary and drowsy. Here we can see clearly that the poet attributes some characteristics of the plowman or country folks to the “way” and the “tinklings” of bells.

4.2.2 Synecdoche

    Synecdoche is virtually a kind of metonymy, but it is a particular kind of metonymy. It is the use of a part of a thing to stand for the whole, or the particular for the general, or the concrete for the abstract; as in “Many hands make light work” and “Two heads are better than one”; or vice versa, the whole for the part, the general for the particular, and the abstract for the concrete. Shakespeare used synecdoche when he says in the poem “Spring” that cuckoo’s song is “Unpleasing to a married ear!” (married ear = married man), and T. S. Eliot uses it when he says in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that “I shall have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (Here he refers to a crab or lobster as “a pair of ragged claws”).

    In Shelley’s Ozymandias, "The hand that mock'd and the heart that fed", he used the device of synecdoche, for "the hand" refers to the sculptor and "the heart" refers to the king. Following is another example of a part for the whole:

When by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead,

And that thou think'st thee free

From all solicitation from me,

Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,

And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see …

(From The Apparition by John Donne)

  Here "worse arms" requires the interpretation of "the arms of a worse person".

    In the Sonnet 66, Shakespeare used a series of abstract words to represent persons with the qualities those abstract terms denote:

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely trumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive Good attending captain Ill,

Tired with all these, from thee would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

    This sonnet tells us that the poet was tired of all the unjust and perverse phenomena in society and that he would like to leave this evil world but for his love who would be alone if he was gone. It is the abstract wording that endows this sonnet with significant and universal meanings. Among the abstract terms are "needy nothing", "purest faith", "gilded honor", "maiden virtue", "right perfection", "strength", "limping sway", "art", "authority", "folly", "skill", "simple truth", "captive Good", and "captain Ill". By using the general and abstract terms to represent the concrete and particular persons, the poet succeeds in emphasizing the fact that the social evils of his time were very general and universal. That is why the poet was so resentful as to cry for restful death.

    From the above survey we come to see that metonymy and synecdoche are so much alike in that both substitute some significant detail or aspect of an experience for the experience itself. So it is hardly worthwhile to distinguish between them, and the former term is increasingly coming to be used for both.

(To be continued)