Tell Me How It Hurts: An Intersection of Poetry and Pain in the Iliad

Abstract

Tell Me How It Hurts:An Intersection of Poetry and Pain in the Iliad Mary Ebbott (bio) In Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry,” the speaker—a teacher—relates through a series of enchanting metaphors how he hopes his students will read a poem: “hold it up to the light / like a color slide,” “press an ear against its hive,” “waterski / across the surface.” The students’ reaction, however, is a very different metaphor: “But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.” This poem uses one kind of pain—the students begin beating the poem with a hose “to find out what it really means”—to get at another kind of pain, the pain of the students and professor in their conflicting expectations and experiences of poetry. Feeling distress over the students’ lack of pleasure in reading this poem, the teacher projects onto it a physical pain. The poem inhabits a body, only to have pain inflicted upon it. That projection of pain onto something else is one of the metaphorical strategies we use to articulate and understand our own pain, according to David Biro, a physician who became an expert on the difficulty of expressing pain when he himself became a patient with a serious and rare disease. When we are in pain, he observes, we might turn to “external objects that reflect or mirror our pain, enabling us to see it better.” It is in literature in particular that Biro finds this strategy of expressing pain used, offering an example from Tolstoy’s short story “Master and Man,” in which a man freezing to death in the wilderness senses the suffering of the trees around him in the snow and cold they are experiencing together. Similarly, if less directly, imagining the poem being tortured in Collins’s poem helps us understand the emotional states of both the professor and the students. Physical pain can be experienced without the mediation of language. Pain can simply be, can exist without description, without linguistic acknowledgement or shaping. Animals feel pain even though they can’t describe it in words to us. Poetry, by contrast, is pure language; it is language for language’s sake. Yet does poetry (or, as Biro suggests, literary metaphor) offer our best chance for communicating physical pain? When I first had a regular e-mail account back in the ’90s, I received an early digital equivalent to a chain letter that contained a list of similes. This list was called something like “bad metaphors” and its examples were supposedly taken [End Page 31] from student writing. (It now seems that attribution was apocryphal, and that these similes were intentionally bad, written for a newspaper contest.) One was something like “he was as tall as a six-foot tree.” Another was along the lines of “the two of them had never met, like two hummingbirds that had also never met.” That these bad metaphors can be funny reveals something about what we are looking for from our metaphors—the humor comes from the upending of our expectations, of what metaphors usually offer to us. “He was tall like a tree” allows us to imagine all sorts of tree-like qualities the man and his stature evoke. Is he sturdy? Is he majestic? Do you feel small standing next to him? Qualifying him “as tall as a six-foot tree,” though, tells us not much more than “he is six feet tall” does: a mundane datum about the man’s height, a fact that would appear on his driver’s license. His tree-like qualities are lost (not to mention that six feet isn’t very tall for a tree). In the second example, too, we wait for hummingbirdness to emerge: does the pair not meet because they were zig-zagging to and fro so quickly, with their heartbeats so rapid and their taste for nectar so insatiable, that they didn’t notice each other when they had the opportunity to meet? Instead, the hummingbirds are reduced to their human counterparts, having only in common the non-event of not...