The task of poetry educators is to remind students “that the most beautiful light comes from the most unrepentant flame,” D. A. Powell wrote somewhere. In this, the distance between the literal and the figurative can be the poem’s hinge. I am compelled by how poets accomplish this in analogy.
By definition, an analogy is a comparison between two things for the purpose of explanation or clarification. The analogy works on the basis of similarity to reveal something greater about the world. Unlike simile or metaphor which aim to show, the analogy's goal is not just to show but also to explain. To point to something bigger.
An analog is a person or thing seen as comparable to another. (It is also an amorphous evocation of nostalgia for Gen X’ers who remember the days of analog with fondness.)
Some have argued that the analogy is the core of human cognition. Certainly, it relies on language—on the slipperiness of connotation and shifts in meaning, and poet Samatar Elmi makes splendid use of analogy to reveal how cognition relies on re-cognition, or knowing by recognizing.
First published in Poetry Review, 2021.
By locating the analogy itself as a subject in the poem, Elmi uncovers a tension in the analogizing, and this tension conveys a tone of displacement through disorientation and juxtaposition. Pronouns are critical to the pull of this poem, and each pronoun packs and repacks differently.
"The Snails" uses analogy as its starting point and its frame. The speaker declares this outright in the first line:
I mean, the analogy writes itself
The "I mean" signals that the speaker is thinking, looking for meaning, using the analogy itself as a way to try and explain something difficult. The reader knows that the speaker is thinking aloud, leading into the strange unwinding of the long, enjambed sentence and its nested figurative languages:
like the onion in a grand conceit
though we are really like two slugs
in a derelict mausoleum.
Something uncanny happens inside the first stanza. The first few lines are linked by strange smilies and metaphors - and the recurring consonance of tea sticks to the tongue. T, itself, is sticky – it links in an awkward way. The onion signals that there are layers to be peeled back in a bigger “conceit,” and the next line begins with a qualifier—”though”—where the speaker brings in a plural pronoun, a “we” that designates a couple, a double, “two slugs” in a “derelict mausoleum.”
Then, in the middle of the first stanza, after this heady, strange beginning, the poet changes tone and pace with a directive:
Google “Snails are….”
Dangerous. Slow.
Destroying my garden.
Our jobs and our women.
Here, the syntax changes, sharpens the gaze, tightens the poem, creates a lexical accumulation of fragments which feel threatening and evoke the language of nativist xenophobia.
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The second stanza begins with a direct address to “You, who cannot speak snail,” and then reclaims the analogy of the immigrant as a snail in a moving home, wearing his shelter on his back.
Read it aloud. Read across the stanza break with its gulf in the middle to hear how a chasm opens between the Google “Our” of nativists and the accusatory turn that hinges on the “You”:
Our jobs and our women.
You, who cannot speak snail,
This is a dramatic You—it is the stuff of dramatic monologue and epic poetry. I hear so many you’s in this, including Rilke’s “[You who never arrived]”…..
Now the shell is a gift and a curse – against the biological or natural view of the snail as a sneaky invader, the the poet presents the analogy from the snails perspective. we know this by the shift in pronoun--the way "Our" does the work of recreating a boundedness, pressing into the tension of inclusion and exclusion.
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So much hinges on the sharp turn between stanzas in Elmi’s poem.
Gaston Bachelard described the poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.” To experience the image, we have to feel it's reverb, and what Elmi does with the snail—how the snail analog carries the shift in pronouns— reminds me of syncopation in music theory, where one holds a note while the chord changes.
We have the snail as it is seen by the gardener—the property owner—and straight from that clipped syntax, the poem moves into direct address.
In the Bachelardian frame, the empty shell evokes the empty nest, which limns dreams of refuge. But B. qualifies this by presenting the paradox of the “vigorous mollusk,” which suggests “the most decisive type of aggressive, aggressiveness that bides its time."
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Ancient burial grounds contain snail shells as allegories of graves in which men would waken. The shells were vessels for the regiving of life – for the return and resurrection—hence the name “resurrection shells”. The body becomes lifeless when the soul leaves it and the shell cannot move anymore; the shell cannot move when separate from the spirit.
The poet here, keeps his shell, insists on its presence, refuses to remove the perceived threat of shell, or to respond to the threat that others make of immigrant. There is something almost Rilkean in this.
Here’s “Part One, Sonnet IV” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
I read it almost as a response or a dialogue with Elmi’s poem, which focuses on the ground, the planet, the property marks and boundaries created by humans—and Rilke’s call to relinquish these heavy things, to look towards the sky. I think what these poets want is similar—to be the “Blessed ones, whole ones” of Rilke’s fifth line—and it’s transfixing to map the distances across time here.
But also, a resonance in Bachelard’s words: "Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones." To be in-between, to be trapped between the perception of threat and the home one carries: to study the poignance of Elmi’s juxtapositions and images.
A final note on the poet, who is new to me.
Samatar Elmi (a.k.a. Knomad Spock ) is a British-Somali poet, rapper and neofolk singer-songwriter “who explores musical genres as extended analogies for his own multiethnic heritage,” which includes Somali nomadic traditions and British working class communities. Elmi’s poetics hinges on what the displacements of language reveal about belonging and identity. “The Hope and the Anchor” and “The Invaders” accomplish this in a very different way from “The Snails.” Portrait of Colossus, his debut pamphlet, is available from flipped eye publishing. I am keeping my fascinated, analog eye on this poet.