Black Hippy Chick Day: Abstractions

lake Once wrote:

“Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.”

I don’t know about you, but I was only affected by the poem when cruelty began knitting a snare. The lines that precede it are a stampede of abstractions that require rational thought. I don’t see them. I don’t feel them. I must turn on my intellect and consider them cerebrally.

And cerebral content rarely makes for effective writing. To illustrate, here is another section of the same poem:

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat,
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

This is where it’s at. This is the stuff of greatness. Emily Dickinson brought abstractions to life in the same way in her poem about hope:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

By bringing us something figurative with concrete images, she has turned an abstraction into something we can see and feel. In other words, you can write about abstractions, but never in isolation. They must be tied to the earth with something more visceral. They cannot be thrown around like confetti. They must be treated responsibly.

Both Byron and Dickinson have chosen to write about important universal themes that everyone’s familiar with. They’ve given us anthropomorphisms so we can see what we know in a new way. It’s not a particularly complicated strategy, but it’s hardly easy to achieve.

Still, extraordinary themes demand extraordinary efforts. If you choose a giant premise, you must work hard for your space on the page.