32 PA RT O N E
We make it, that is, with a little help from the verse: two halves sharing the
same meter, and breathing in and out on the one rhyme sound, “rain /...
again.” In legend as in everyday life, in spiritual and earthly ways, we react to
our environment. Weather’s doings literally touch on our own in this medieval
lyric, thanks to the genius of poetic language, the grace of metaphor: wind and
rain turn toward love and home.
Meta-phor, an “across-carrying” from one realm to another, from nature to
us, gives both realms new point: windy orator, rain of insults, stormy relation-
ship, stream of consciousness, bear market, and so on. Metaphor is “the great
human revolution,” Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai has said, “at least on a par with
the invention of the wheel.” What would hymns, gospel, blues, folk songs from
all times and places do without wind, rain, sky, rivers, shores, roads?
Metaphors leap without warning from physical to human nature. And usu-
ally, once an image has done its job—wind shows the force of longing, rain the
release of tension—we leave that image behind (otherwise Robert Burns’s love
“like a red, red rose” might sprout thorns). But in “Western Wind” the speaker
desires both halves equally, fair weather and a fair friend. Without signaling as
much, these lines bind the molecules of metaphor.
Often metaphors move from material to immaterial, from earthly to spiritual:
“Thou art my rock and my redeemer.” Drawn from nature, they tie humankind
in one with that world. Yet they do something else. Analogy (or simile) hedges
its bet, saying “like”: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, / So
do our minutes hasten to their end.” But metaphors shock us, saying outright
something that ’s nottrue. A rain of insults doesn’t drop from the sky, a windy
orator doesn’t ruffle your hair.
So the shock of metaphor, its being not true, can expose nature ’s other-
ness as it still arcs between the two realms, physical and human nature: sea of
troubles, emotional desert. “Western Wind” connects but doesn’t confuse us
with weather. There ’s the poem’s crux, environmentally speaking. Since it ’s we
who voice a metaphor or any image, poetry’s never pure of human presence.
That tension, ourselves attaching to things, can bode ecologic trouble yet bring
out human truths.
Not only would an Atlantic westerly blow the (English) voyager shoreward,
in an age before steam power, and bring rain to ease drought and grow crops. As
far back as we know, seasonal weathers have lent sense to our lives. God chas-
tens Job “out of the whirlwind.” The Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer,” in Ezra Pound ’s
version, “Weathered the winter, wretched outcast / Deprived of my kinsmen.”
“When April with its showers sweet / Has pierced March drought down to the
root,” in the Canterbury Tales, “When Zephyrus [the west wind] with his sweet
breath / Has stirred on every wood and heath / The tender sprouts... / Then