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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on April 17, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(2):175-191; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp019
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Nightingale's Drought, The Nightingale's Draught: On Metaphor, Magic, and Symbol

Dan Beachy-Quick*

*Colorado State University, USA

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Rainbird, to what far off place
are you crying?
The world is overflowing
with that water.
The water where sea and sound
divide ...
            —Kabir


   Drought
 
Drought threatens both the world and the poem. In the world, drought destroys plants and the animals that eat them, destroys the generative capacity of seed and stem and leaf; drought grows dust. Drought in the poem grows dust in the mind. The image of a plant may be dropped on the page, but the plant on the page is a form of dust, it lacks a vital principle, and desiccates the mind it enters. Experience plants such ill harvest. In Songs of Experience, Blake writes of his pretty rose tree:

A flower was offered to me,
Such a flower as May never bore,
But I said, ‘I’ve a pretty rose tree,’
And I passed the sweet flower of o’er.
Then I turned to . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Rain-Making and Metaphor
 

   Symbols and Circles
 

   Draught
 

   Last Words
 

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