The Hidden Iconic Pattern of a Poem: An Analysis of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken

Abstract

Iconicity is the overt or covert similarity between form and meaning, present in different modalities of expression including language, music and the visual media. For example, onomatopoeia overtly represents natural sounds, while photography overtly represents the world. On the other hand, music covertly evokes mood through universal melodic patternings of sound. As argued by Masako Hiraga (2005), the medium of poetry is a modality which heightens verbal iconicity. Like a piece of music, a poem has a hidden structure which is achieved through a patterning of sound. This patterning works on many levels, including both overt and covert sound patterning, and visual imagery. While the presence of such structure is well known (e.g., rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, simile and metaphor), the specific correlation between the form and meaning characteristic of each individual poem is less well studied. This paper argues that such a correlation exists, and constitutes a hidden iconic pattern or fingerprint of each individual poem, which is present inside it as a trace of the act of its creation. This hidden iconicity is what makes a poem memorable and difficult to translate. The poem The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost (see the Appendix), evokes a strong visual metaphor of a fork in the road representing a choice of direction in the journey of life. This metaphor is not unique to Frost but has been identified in the framework of the theory of cognitive metaphor (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Turner, 1987; Turner, 1991; Turner, 1996) as the cross-culturally ubiquitous metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. The meaning of the poem, which emerges from a detailed analysis of this metaphor, is iconically reinforced on every level of the language system – phonetic, lexical and syntactic.

Keywords

Cognitive metaphor / iconic pattern / iconicity / poetic translation / Robert Frost

References

[1] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1797). Kubla Khan. Accessed on June 3, 2007 from Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia, http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html.

[2] Freeman, Margaret H. (1995). Metaphor makes meaning: Dickinson’s conceptual universe. Journal of Pragmatics, 24(6), 643-666.

[3] Freeman, Margaret H. (1997). Grounded spaces: Deictic—self anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Language and Literature, 6(1), 7-28.

[4] Freeman, Margaret H. (2000). Poetry and the scope of metaphor: Toward a cognitive theory of literature. In: Barcelona, Antonio (Ed.),Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads (pp. 253-280). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

[5] Freeman, Margaret H. (2004). Crossing the boundaries of time: Merleau—Ponty’s phenomenology and cognitive linguistic theories. In: Soares da Silva, Augusto; Torres, Amadeu, & Gonçalves, Miguel, (Eds.), Linguagem, cultura e cognição: Estudos de linguistica cognitiva, Vol. 2 (pp. 643-655). Coimbra: Almedina.

[6] Freeman, Margaret H. (2007a). The fall of the wall between literary studies and linguistics: Cognitive poetics. In: Kristiansen, Gitte; Achard, Michel; Rene Dirven, Rene, & Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco (Eds.), Applications of cognitive linguistics: Foundations and fields of application. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

[7] Freeman, Margaret H. (2007b). Minding: Feeling, form and meaning in the creation of poetic iconicity. In: Brone, Geert & Vendaele, Jeroen (Eds.), Cognitive poetics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

[8] Freeman, Margaret H. (2007c). Poetic iconicity. In: Chłopicki, Władysław; Pawelec, Andrzej, & Pokojska, Agnieszka (Eds.), Cognition in language: Volume in honour of Professor Elżbieta Tabakowska (pp. 472-501). Kraków: Tertium.

[9] Frost, Robert. (1920). The road not taken. Accessed on June 3, 2007 from Bartleby.com Great Book Online, http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html.

[10] Frost, Robert. (1923). Stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Accessed on June 3, 2007 from Ketzle Frost homepage, http://www.ketzle.com/frost/snowyeve.htm.

[11] Frost, Robert. (1915). Mending wall. Accessed on June 3, 2007 from Bartleby.com Great Book Online, http://www.bartleby.com/118/2.html.

[12] Hiraga, Masako K. & Joanna Radwańska—Williams (Eds.) (1994). Metaphor and iconicity. Special issue of Journal of Pragmatics, 22(1).

[13] Hiraga, Masako K. & Joanna Radwańska—Williams (Eds.) (1995). Literary pragmatics: Cognitive metaphor and the structure of the poetic text. Special issue of Journal of Pragmatics, 24(6).

[14] Hiraga, Masako K. (2005). Metaphor and iconicity: A Cognitive approach to analysing texts. Basingstoke, UK & New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan.

[15] Jakobson, Roman. (1971). Selected writings. Vol. II. The Hague: Mouton.

[16] Jakobson, Roman. (1987a [1960]).Linguistics and poetics. In: Jakobson 1987d, pp. 62-94. [Originally published in Style in language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 350—377.]

[17] Jakobson, Roman. (1987b. [1961.]) Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry. In: Jakobson 1987d, pp. 121-144. [Originally published in Russian as “Poezija Grammatiki i Grammatika Poezii” in Poetics poetyka poetika, Warsaw, 1961; also published in Verbal art, verbal sign, verbal time, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.37—46.]

[18] Jakobson, Roman. (1987c. [1980.]) Subliminal verbal patterning in poetry. In: Jakobson 1987d, pp. 250-261. [Originally published in Studies in general and oriental linguistics, presented to Shiro Hattori, Tokyo: TEC, 1970; expanded version in Jakobson 1971, pp. 136—147; also published in Verbal art, verbal sign, verbal time, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 59—68.]

[19] Jakobson, Roman. (1987d). Language in literature. Edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

[20] Johnson, Mark. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[21] Keats, John. (1875). Ode to autumn. Accessed on June 3, 2007 from Bartleby.com Great Books Online, http://www.bartleby.com/106/255.html.

[22] Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[23] Lakoff, George. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In: Ortony, Andrew (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 202-251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[24] Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[25] Lakoff, George & Turner, Mark. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[26] Peck, M. Scott. (2003). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. 25^th Anniversary Edition. (Originally published in 1978 by Simon & Schuster).

[27] Shakespeare, William. (1603—1606). Macbeth. Accessed on June 17, 2007 from The complete works of William Shakespeare, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html.

[28] Shakespeare, William. (1609). Sonnet 73. Accessed on June 3, 2007 from Shakespeare Online, http://www.shakespeare—online.com/sonnets/73.html, and from Poetry Life and Times, http://www.poetrylifeandtimes.com/valrevw26.html.

[29] Turner, Mark. (1987). Death is the mother of beauty: Mind, metaphor, criticism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[30] Turner, Mark. (1991). Reading minds. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[31] Turner, Mark. (1996). The literary mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[32] Violi, Patrizia (Ed.) (2000). Phonosymbolism and poetic language , Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers.

[33] Williams, Joanna Radwańska. (1991). Metaphor in a translation by Boris Pasternak of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. In: Fendos, Paul George (Ed.), Cross—cultural communication, East and West Vol. 3 (pp. 487-526). Taiwan: National Cheng Kung University.

[34] Williams, Joanna Radwańska. (1993). A paradigm lost: The linguistic theory of Mikołaj Kruszewski. (= Volume 72 in series Studies in the History of the Language Sciences.) Amsterdam & Philadephia: John Benjamins.

[35] Williams, Joanna Radwańska. (1996). Kruszewski’s Semiotics. In: Jankowsky, Kurt R. (ed.), Multiple perspectives on the historical dimensions of language, (pp. 153-159). Munster: Nodus Publikationen.

[36] Williams, Joanna Radwańska. (2000). Arbitrariness and iconicity. In: Violi, 2000, pp. 85-97. [Abridged version of “The Problem of Iconicity”, in Hiraga & Radwańska—Williams, 1994, pp. 23—36.]