After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock
That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
It's not entirely accurate (or at least it leaves out a lot of teachable moments about the mechanics and devices of poetry) to say that Plath's poem Words is "written entirely in metaphor."
YanıtlaSilThe unadorned juxtaposition of the single word title "Words" to the single word first line "Axes" is a stunning example of metonymy. It's an almost violent use of metonymy in that the reader is nearly forced to at once accept the inevitable poetic equation from which the entire poem flows: Words = Axes.
The trope of the echoes presented as (or compared to) horses in the first stanza and the sap similarly equated with tears and then with striving water in the second stanza are similes ("like" being the telltale giveaway there).
That it all bundles into an overarching metaphoric meditation on the nature of creating art through words is certainly valid, but to skip some of the devices that are decidedly different from metaphor in the details of the poem is to miss a chance to increase peoples' understanding of how intricate and dense a poem this is.