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Derek Coyle published Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in 2023. He has published poems in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Texas Literary Review. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s in Ireland

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The Power of Metaphor:
Les Murray’s ‘Dog Fox Field’ and John Montague’s ‘Between’

 Early on in the writing out of thought about poetry Aristotle argued that great poets are distinguished by the force of their metaphors. That is, the creation of strong metaphors is at the heart of poetry. Certainly, poets seem to enjoy making daring comparisons, provoking new avenues of thought and conception through striking and original juxtapositions. Needless to say, metaphors are alive and well in contemporary poetry. One can think of the bog poems of Seamus Heaney; where, for example, in a poem like ‘Bogland’, the deep storage capacities of the bog become a metaphor for the national memory of the Irish people. As Heaney’s poem reminds us, one of the key features in the development of metaphor in the English language tradition has been the use of the extended metaphor. John Donne (1572 – 1631) is often seen as the earliest exemplar of this tradition, in poems like ‘The Flea’, a poem which is still admired for its daring comparisons. We have an extended metaphor before us when a comparison is made early on in the poem, but is not just left there as a type of local metaphor in the fabric of the poem; but, rather, the comparison is further elaborated in audacious extensions across the poem, often becoming the main feature or point of the poem.

Happily, the extended metaphor is alive and well in contemporary poetry; with the endurance of the technique a testament to its value. Some well-known examples might include Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Valentine’. In this poem the onion becomes an unusual but revealing love token across the poem. In recent Irish poetry, Eavan Boland’s ‘The War Horse’, sees a horse broken free from a Travellers’ encampment, as it runs through a suburban housing estate in Dublin in the 1970s, become a harbinger of the potential irruption of violence from the North in the capital of the Republic. Medbh McGuckian’s ‘The Butterfly Farm’ might be read as a mid-80s second-wave feminist analysis of how society breeds women like butterflies; on an almost clinical and industrial scale, using subtle and not so subtle forms of violence. Of course, the great extended metaphor of post-war Irish poetry is Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, but a close examination of this fine poem is for another essay.

What is the value of this practice within poetry? What is achieved through the artful development of an idea across a poem? We might follow metaphor’s lead here; what it has to teach us: thinking is often best expressed through concrete examples. Most folk come to understand abstract ideas through their concrete expression. One of the best examples of this process that I know of in contemporary poetry is the Australian poet Les Murray’s ‘Dog Fox Field’ (1991).

Here is the poem:

DOG FOX FIELD

 ‘The test for feeblemindedness was, they had to make up a sentence
using the words dog, fox, and field.’
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxJudgement at Nuremburg

These were no leaders, but they were first
into the dark on Dog Fox Field:

Anna who rocked her head, and Paul
who grew big and yet giggled small,

Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans
who knew his world as a fox knows a field.

Hunted with needles, exposed, unfed,
this time in their thousands they bore sad cuts

for having gazed, and shuffled, and failed
to field the lore of prey and hound

they then had to thump and cry in the vans
that ran while stopped in Dog Fox Field.

Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end,
they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field.[1]

On the surface, this poem appears to be relatively simple; a series of unrhymed couplets. With a poem, it is always close reading that matters, continued attention to small details, by the progressive accumulation of which a picture is gradually built up, or an idea is explored or expressed or developed – depending on the type of poem. This poem is prefaced by a significant epigraph that cannot be ignored: ‘the test for feeblemindedness was, they had to make up a sentence using the words dog, fox and field.’ This circumstance was considered during the Nuremburg trials. The fact that the Nazi’s had developed an intelligence test to determine who was worthy of the human race and who wasn’t; and the test was the ability to construct a simple sentence using the words ‘dog’, ‘fox’, and ‘field’.

So, this is the starting point of Murray’s poem. From here we see him build his poem out of sentences containing these three words. These three words, then, are the basis of his extended metaphor, the frame around which the poem will be built, and the means by which he will offer us a daring re-conception of the world. In the poem he personalizes a representative sample of the people who suffered the trauma of the concentration camps by naming them: Anna, Paul, Irma, and Hans. He tells us: ‘these were no leaders, but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field.’ The word ‘dark’ echoes with suggestions of a moral dark, a place of no light; quite literally, a place of darkness, confusion, chaos, and fear. In this first couplet he lays out the foundation of his metaphor: the concatenation of the words ‘Dog Fox Field’. Given the capital letters, we observe he is using a proper noun. He is talking of a place with this name. You can enter a place called Dog Fox Field; and so the concentration camps appear to be re-named, re-thought, re-presented in this first re-combining of the words from the Nazi intelligence test. Through this strategy a complex metaphor will be constructed and developed.

Through simple descriptions, ‘Anna who rocked her head’, ‘Paul/who grew big and yet giggled small’, Murray establishes that his protagonists live with disabilities – so-called. Not fully in control of muscle movements; although being fully grown, yet somehow being child-like in behaviour and thought. In the description of Hans, Murry starts to extend his metaphor. Hans ‘who knew his world as a fox knows a field.’ We see Murray’s play on the words ‘fox’ and ‘field’. He asks his readers to think about how a fox knows a field, and how this might suggest something of how a person with an intellectual disability might know the world or their world. We might think: intimately, intuitively, immediately, and perhaps, in some wily way. But it is a small world, with a bigger world around it that remains undiscovered, unknown, unexplored. One might circle around and around this field, finding all one needs to survive there (because your needs are not complex), and you might have little need to travel further. There is a wider frame you might miss, just by looping around this constrained sphere without breaking out of it.

Murray elaborates on the suffering that happened in this dark place, this ‘Dog Fox Field’. Here people were ‘hunted’ with needles, ‘exposed’, ‘unfed’. Thousands of people like Hans, Irma, Paul and Anna, ‘bore’ cuts and bruising, suffered physical and psychological violence. The verb ‘bore’ is significant, suggesting a passive suffering, of being acted upon, of undergoing maltreatment. The people who undergo this, suffer it for not reaching the standard, for not being like the majority – who do not gaze, or shuffle, or fail ‘to field the lore of prey and hound.’ This line implies that regular life is ‘the lore of prey and hound’. This phrasing suggests that most of life is something of a wild jungle of dog eat dog (or fox), a competitive arena our protagonists don’t comprehend in their innocence and lack of guile. And so we see how Murray starts to turn the words ‘dog’, ‘fox’, ‘field’ against regular society in a form of critique; a judgement of our world from the standards of another. Our way of life certainly can be viewed this way; there is, lamentably, too much truth in this perspective. ‘Field’ is here directly, but ‘Fox’ and ‘Dog’ are there by implication as ‘prey’ and ‘hound’; and, of course, we and our protagonists are there too, sometimes as ‘prey’, other times as ‘hound.’

Punctuation matters a lot in most writing; it matters a great deal in poetry where every gesture is weighted and considered. I think there has been an editorial slip-up here in Murray’s poem. And it recurs across several different printed editions of this poem. The transition from ‘hound’ to ‘they then’ doesn’t read well syntactically as a run-on line. Read it aloud yourself. Perhaps further editions might clarify this. I suggest a full-stop after ‘hound’.

In his penultimate couplet Murray is heading towards the end, and the poem is starting to generate the sense of an ending, a resolution. The protagonists of the poem were early test subjects for the unfolding Nazi horrors. As we recall, before the Nazi’s ramped up their efforts for ‘the final solution’, they used exhaust fumes to poison their victims, through rubber tubes running from the exhaust pipe to the back of sealed in vans or trucks. How our protagonists ‘thump’ and ‘cry’. Murray’s phrasing is resonant: ‘the vans that ran while stopped in Dog Fox Field.’ In this place of moral horrors, progress stops, directionality ceases to exist, purpose, development, let’s say, evolution. Technical advancements, the van, fail in a certain significant sense. Murray builds on his earlier suggestion; that the concentration camps are a new place; a horror the poem renames as ‘Dog Fox Field’, where the vulnerable are hunted down like a fox in a field. However, the real significance of this re-naming, this new designation, only becomes apparent in the final couplet.

Some poems conclude by not just ending the meditation offered in the poem, wrapping up its observations pithily; tying up its thoughts. Rather, some poems end by opening the poem out to the world beyond the horizon of the poem, often as a challenge. This is what Murray does here. Let us look at this final couplet more closely:

Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end,
they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field.

The poem shifts in address here, reaching out to ‘us’ directly. Look at the shift in pronouns: ‘our’, ‘we’. The protagonists of the poem become ‘our sentries’; they stand guard over our civilization. Their holocaust of abuse and suffering did not end with the liberation of the concentration camps; it is on-going and continues. They are a warning to us, threshold figures; how we treat them is a sign of our civility and decency. So, this poem ends on a moral challenge to us all. It appeals directly to us: build a healthier civilization, do better, look out for these your weaker members; how you treat them is an index of your decency. And so, in this gesture, the power of the poem’s central metaphor is revealed. ‘Dog Fox Field’ is a place we can enter still; and might actually be in at any time. Right now, it exists somewhere in the world.

And so, the strength of Murray’s metaphor is demonstrated in his construction of this new idea, this new conception of the world, this viewing of our world and its values from a fresh point of view. This conception or idea is generated purely through the words of this poem. By means of his poetic technique, his deft use of metaphor, he has generated a new mode of understanding, an alternative way of thinking, startling and striking as it is. The place, Dog Fox Field, this proper noun, is not found on any map, but we know it exists. We understand what Murray has said to us, and we know it is important, even as his poem is really just an idea, a thought. Our understanding of the world shifts, our moral sympathies are extended or deepened. And all through the power and possibility of his daring and original metaphoric conception.

And now, for the sake of comparison and contrast, let us consider a different poem altogether, John Montague’s ‘Between’. This is a fine late poem from Montague’s collection Smashing the Piano (1999), a poem and collection that deserve more critical attention than either have received since the time of publication. ‘Between’ is another extended metaphor, dedicated to the naturalist writer and journalist Michael Viney. The poem is set in the Knockmealdown mountain range that stretches across the Tipperary and Waterford border in Ireland’s south-east. Here is the poem:

BETWEEN
(for Michael Viney)

That deep, dark pool. To come upon it,
after driving across the Gap in midsummer,
the hedges freighted with fuchsia, hawthorn,
blood-red and white under shining veils of rain.

A wind flurry finecombing the growing grain
as a full-uddered cow precedes us along the lane,
a curious calf poking its lubberly head over stone
while the country road winds betwixt and between.

Sudden, at the summit of the Knockmealdowns,
a chill black lake, a glacial corrie or tarn,
some large absence, hacked, torn
from the far side of the dreaming cliff.

A brooding silence, a hoarded font of nothing,
lightless, still, opaque…severely alone.
Except when a shiver, a skirl of wind
makes the waters tremble, mild as that field of grain.

But on the shorn flank of the mountain,
a flowering, flaring bank of rhododendron,
exalted as some pagan wedding procession.
Fathomless darkness, silent raging colour:

A contrast to make your secret self tremor,
like a child cradled in this quarry’s murmur,
delighted but lost between the dark, the blossoming.
On one side, a moorland’s bareness, rufous heather

Sheltering a long-nebbed curlew, bog asphodel or lobelia
and, on the other, that terraced orchestra of colour,
avenues of lavish amethyst blossom.
Chill of winter: full warmth of summer,

colliding head on in stillness, and a heavy aroma.[2]

The poem’s title (‘Between’) is significant, but we will come back to that. This poem is unusual in that it opens with a clear eye on its destination, its subject: ‘That deep, dark pool’, in a sentence that is only half of the opening line. The poem will wander away from this subject, almost like a winding country road in rural Ireland, only to circle back to it later. Montague builds his extended metaphor across this poem from elements he observes before him as he travels deeper into this geographical terrain. To help our reading of this poem, I suggest my own metaphor: this poem resembles a painterly composition. Montague selects key details from the scene and arranges them in a certain way to convey an impression, to build towards a particular idea or understanding. He draws our ‘eye’ to this pool first; then, as if standing back to observe the full scene, he builds up the picture detail by detail; but all these details become more significant than just the things in themselves; taken together, they help to construct or build up a picture of the world in more than geographical terms.

‘Between’ consists of regular quatrains, built from long lines, concluding with a stand-alone final line. The poem is unrhymed, but it dances with an abundance of internal music, the subtle assonance and consonance that sings across its lines. Looking at the overall architecture of the poem, there might be something in the argument that the first two quatrains ought to be considered together as a description of the drive up to the peak of the mountain; and that the next two quatrains deal with the black lake which returns us to the centre of the poem’s concerns. There is a turning point with the ‘but’ of stanza five. Here the poet elaborates and builds upon the central conceit of the poem. From here he builds towards the end, where his central idea is concentrated and summed up in the poem’s final stand-alone line.

The poem opens with midsummer at its height. Note the beautiful sonic textures of the opening, so rich and full and delicate: the ‘hedges’ and ‘hawthorn’, ‘freighted with fuchsia’. The contrasting colours: ‘blood-red and white’. And all covered under: ‘shining veils of rain’. Even the rain seems exquisite and luminous. In a wonderful personification, the wind seems to ‘fine-comb’ – a verb that is surely an invention of the poet? – the ‘growing grain’. Nature is alive, blossoming and flourishing; young and vigorous, like the ‘curious calf’ poking his head over the stone wall. So, plant and creature merge in bounty. Musically, the ‘full-uddered’ connects across the line with the ‘lubberly head’, in two finely balanced symmetrical phrases. So, the sonic texture of the quatrains is luscious and rich too, a match for the vibrant, full life of midsummer, as the poem’s diction and lines equal the content or subject of the quatrains, the pictures conjured visually. So, sound and image speak to and complement each other. The second quatrain concludes with the resonant phrase ‘betwixt and between’ – something in-between is suggested, a premonition or foreshadowing of what will come later.

Drama is suggested with the energy of the ‘Sudden’ that opens the next line. And in that ‘sudden’, the earlier ‘uddered’ and ‘lubberly’ echo. The focus now is the ‘chill’ lake. The first sign or hint of something cool in the summer heat; but it is ‘black’, and so not a good ‘chill’! What we come to know of in geography class as a ‘corrie’, is known of in Northern dialects as a ‘tarn’. Well into the poem, we encounter our first abstract phrase: ‘some large absence’. Something taken ‘from the far side of the dreaming cliff’. And so, the poem reveals two sides to the mountain: the empty, the absent, the dark and the chill; and then, its opposite: the dreaming side, so full of promise, luscious, rich, energetic, entirely present. And now we are at the metaphoric heart of the poem; this tension between these two opposites, this contradiction at the heart of our experience. We witness how Montague has subtly worked himself into the territory of an extended metaphor. This mountain, even as its physical features are being described, starts to stand for something else. Its two contrasting sides, so clearly differentiated, might just suggest something more. The poem will build on this tension.

The medial caesura is a device that becomes central to this poem’s form and embodies a significant aspect of its meaning. We first encounter it in the centre of the first line of stanza four. The pause between the ‘brooding silence’ (with its echo of ‘sudden’, ‘uddered’, ‘lubberly’), and the oxymoronic phrase: ‘a hoarded font of nothing’ – how can you hoard ‘nothing’? The open empty space of the ellipsis is perfect: an open space that contains silence – a non-saying that can be heard, encountered, experienced. Brilliantly, we see the return of the ‘skirl of wind’, echoing the fine-combing wind from earlier in the poem. And so, this scene is haunted by what came before; it is the dark ‘other’ of the scene of plenitude described previously in the poem. There is presence and there is absence, there is life in the midst of death, perhaps; there is a ‘betwixt and between’, fullness happens in the midst of nothingness. And, as the stanza opened with a medial caesura, it closes with one in a wonderfully balanced symmetry; with the ‘makes’ poised against  the ‘mild’; the ‘water’ offset against the ‘grain’.

In stanza five, as suggested earlier, the speaker seems to stand back and survey, measure up the scene before him. There is this lake, this blank emptiness; but there is also this ‘flowering, flaring bank of rhododendron’. The vivid simile: ‘exalted as some pagan wedding procession.’ We note the rich internal music: ‘flank’, ‘bank’, ‘mountain’ and ‘pagan’; ‘flank’, ‘flowering’, and ‘flaring’; the end-rhymes, full-on: ‘mountain’, ‘rhododendron’, ‘procession’. So much hinges on that ‘but’. One imagines a pagan wedding procession as elaborate, rich, wild, and exhilarating; a crazy joy. The medial caesura returns in the stanza’s final line: ‘fathomless darkness, silent raging colour’. What is a silent rage; how does colour have an emotion? This oxymoronic phrase suggests intensity, vibrancy, frustration and energy. A passionate flaring or flowering in the midst of a depthless emptiness; such is the poem’s almost Buddhist-like contemplation of the nature of being. So the poem holds in tension the poet’s understanding of our existence. So the poem’s big theme is realized or brought to the fore.

Something in this scene sees us catch a breath. This striking contrast sees a ‘tremor’ run through our ‘secret self’. What is the nature of this ‘secret’ self? As I read the poem, I take it the poet is referring to that part of us that is aware of our mortality; that part of our awareness, so rarely articulated, that knows that life thrives in the midst of death and dying. The simile suggests this line of thought: ‘like a child cradled in this quarry’s murmur’. A quarry is a place of excavation, a type of destruction of the landscape, and emptiness, but one which can cradle a child, blissfully unaware of its context, ‘delighted but lost’. So, our lives are part of a delicate balancing act; hanging between ‘the dark, the blossoming’; a symmetrical phrase which represents the crux of the poem’s central conceit; a crux upon which the poem turns as much as our lives do. And so the poet clinches the central conception of his extended metaphor: there are two sides to the mountain, suggestive of the dual sides of our existence; the bareness of the moor, with its heather, curlew, bog asphodel or lobelia; plants that can survive on slim pickings; and then, ‘that terraced orchestra of colour’, a fine image of the harmony of diverse elements working together, with the idea of an orchestra as the unifying local metaphor. This luscious side of the mountain is layered with elements that speak harmoniously to each other across terraces; rather like the lines within an orchestra; each element is distinct but has a role to play in the overall harmonious effect along this side of the mountain. Once again, sound and image are combined. It would appear that nature has constructed a wonderful city here in its ‘avenues of lavish amethyst blossom.’

A series of double medial caesuras are brought into play formally as the poem works towards its crescendo. The ‘chill’ is balanced against ‘full’, the ‘winter’ against ‘summer’; with the differing elements of sound and scent brought together, ‘colliding’. The poem manages to conclude on a positive note; despite the juxtaposition of life and death, a presence emerges that is amazing despite everything. Our experience of existence is sensual and embodied, assaulting the senses: the experience of silence, a silence heard and articulated, and that rich scent of it all, taken in with the breath, a breath one imagines brought in through the nostrils.

What begins as the description of a type of pastoral scene, a richly textured Irish summer, develops across the poem into a deeper meditation on life and death, the nothingness from which we emerge, and to which we return. And this inner meditation is made possible through features of the landscape, particularly the lake on the mountainside. And so the poem transports us – it takes us to the place on the mountain, but it also takes us somewhere else. This poem is a description poem to a point; a poem worthy of the pastoral tradition of celebration of the bounty of the natural world. But, it is also a metaphysical conceit in the most basic sense, as it develops ideas about the nature of our existence. In this sense then it is a poem of the mind, poetry rising to a type of Philosophy; or a type of defiant sacred, a version of negative epiphany. Perhaps there is nothing casual about that pagan wedding procession comparison after all.

Through his elaborate extended metaphor Montague brings an altogether human construct into being, a poem. Through the poem a cultural world is revealed, a world generated through language; the sophisticated artful use of language that is poetry. The poem appears to rest on the natural world, but what is really offered in the poem is an interpretation of the world, one that is constructed through elements drawn from what Montague sees before him. And it is through this strategy that Montague’s ‘Between’ resembles the earlier ‘Dog Fox Field’ by Murray. A human conception of the world is generated through each of these poems; a human ‘world’ is elaborated; we witness the activity of civilization building at first hand.

Given that we’ve brought these two poems together to examine the function of metaphor within them, what else might we say about them as we read them side by side; what are their respective strengths and weaknesses? It might be fair to say that the great strength of Murray’s ‘Dog Fox Field’ lies in the moral force of its message and the role the metaphor plays in generating that. This poem invites us into a new thought, the re-framing of a particular human experience. In terms of the texture of the poem, its sonic impact; the poem is less powerful in this area. We have straightforward lists, the children’s names; the lists of three: ‘hunted’, ‘exposed’, ‘unfed’, and the ‘gazed’, ‘shuffled’, ‘failed’. Perhaps the phrase ‘sad cuts’ could have been stronger? In contrast, Montague’s metaphor appeals to our sympathies in a different way, speaking to our subjective inner experience of the trembling of mortality in our being; a subject rarely expressed in public discourse, but which the privacy of poetry articulates regularly enough. In summary, Montague’s metaphor works with physical features of a mountainside which he layers with a larger metaphysical resonance as the metaphor is elaborated. This poem’s concerns are more private and egocentric in contrast to the political and moral tenor of Murray’s poem. Given their distinct emphases, different readerships will appreciate the value of either poem according to their preferences, needs, and biases.

However, it is fair to say that Montague’s ‘Between’ is far more richly textured than Murray’s ‘Dog Fox Field’. Montague’s ‘Between’ develops memorable sonic sequences that speak to the ear to reach the heart and the mind: ‘deep’, ‘dark’, and ‘driving’; the onomatopoeic ‘shiver’; ‘chill’, ‘full’, balanced off against each other, and then mirrored in the final line with ‘colliding’ and ‘stillness.’ In that final line the ‘head’ is balanced against the ‘heavy’ (sonically speaking), the far side of the medial caesura. The symmetrical balancing of several medial caesuras, a formal expression of the poem’s central conceit, how the world is a delicate balancing of life and death, is a particularly impressive formal achievement of this poem, along with its many striking and quotable phrases. So, the poetic texture of this poem is ‘lavish’ (to use one of its own terms) and will see readers regularly return to the poem to savour these features in and of themselves.

All in all, then, we might say after reading Les Murray’s ‘Dog Fox Field’ alongside John Montague’s ‘Between’, an extended metaphor helps us to understand the world at a deeper level. In the best examples, all of the artfulness of poetry is used to embed the ideas explored and presented in a more pleasing and hence communicative way. As such, the artfulness of poetry allows for a deeper, more inner experience of the idea. The concerns of the poem then, are not just a concept to be communicated from mind to mind (somewhat akin to Philosophy perhaps), but rather, through the layering of the idea by means of sound and image, the idea becomes more tactile, more sensual, allowing for a more bodily appropriation and owning of the idea expressed. Poetry, it would appear, has the capacity to communicate sophisticated concepts in a concentrated and layered way, with a well thought out extended metaphor being an extremely effective vehicle for this complex task.

[1] Les Murray, Dog Fox Field (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 19910, p. 50.

[2] John Montague, Smashing the Piano (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999), pp. 27 – 28.

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