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By Root 886 0

the theory of the divine right of kings. What is the field to which this is a guide? The book’s subtitle alludes not to any intellectual or disciplinary field but to the genre of handbooks or guidebooks used to assist the reader in identifying wildlife or other objects in nature: birds, plants, rocks, trees, insects, and so forth—a practical, browsable, publicly accessible handbook like Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. “Poetic metaphor” in Lakoff and Turner’s guide is a “tool” that “allows us to understand ourselves and our world.”29 As for poets, they are “us,” with a linked-in database of conceptual metaphors, into which their poems can be neatly docketed:

Great poets can speak to us because they use the modes of thought we all possess. Using the capacities we all share, poets can illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticize our ideologies.30

Words like we, us, and our, when deployed in “philosophical” utterances, should probably come with a warning label, since they are both universalizing and coercive. Even in apparently open assertions where the specific nature of “our” experiences, ideologies, etc., is left to the reader, the claim is made that “we” all possess modes of thought that “respond” to the works of great poets. This claim is not made more convincing by the book’s recurrent citation from a single translated volume of Sanskrit verse—mentioned, with textual examples, six different times in the text, presumably as a nod to the “universal” nature of poetic metaphor—or by a Navaho war god’s horse song cited from an anthology of “poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania.”31 In any case, it is a profoundly uninteresting claim from the point of view of literature.

About the horse song, the reader learns, in commentary on the (translated) line “My horse with a mane made of short rainbows,” that “The structure of a rainbow, its band of curved lines, is mapped onto an arc of curved hair, and many rainbows onto many such arcs on the horse’s mane. Such image-mapping prompts us to map our evaluation of the source domain onto the target. We know that rainbows are beautiful, special, inspiring, larger than life, almost mystic, and that seeing them makes us happy and awestruck. This knowledge is mapped onto what we know of the horse: it too is awe-inspiring, beautiful, larger than life, almost mystic.”32 Here is that troublesome we again—“we know that rainbows are beautiful, special, inspiring, larger than life, almost mystic.” Well, maybe. It depends on the literary context and on the culture. A person familiar with the book of Genesis might have a different set of associations with the rainbow, as might an aficionado of leprechauns in Irish folklore, a reader of D. H. Lawrence, or a fan of Judy Garland. None of these associations would, presumably, be germane to the Navaho war god’s song. But why should the reader believe that we, a transhistorical, transnational, transglobal we, “know” that rainbows are beautiful, special, make us happy etc., and that therefore this is a pertinent interpretation of a line of verse translated into English from a Navaho poem?

Having given us the line and these truisms about their own assumptions on the universal meaning of rainbows, the authors then quote a larger section of the translated poem (still with no indication of whether it is the entire poem or an excerpt, and with no notations about Navaho culture, the tradition of Navaho verse-making, or even the poem’s date). “This line,” they say, “comes from a poem containing a series of such image-mappings”:

My horse with a hoof like a striped agate,

with his fetlock like a fine eagle plume:

my horse whose legs are like quick lightning

whose body is an eagle-plumed arrow:

my horse whose tail is like a trailing black cloud.

Working without any context, a reader can still see some poetic elements here that repay discussion, like the repeated refrain beginning “my horse,” the stripes that seem to characterize both rainbow