I think it's imagery. In poetry, images are placed in the most prominent position. Therefore, metaphor and symbol are directly related to images, which are represented by images, that is, images may be metaphors or symbols.
Metaphor is one of the universal principles of language. However, poetic metaphor is an aesthetic metaphor, not a metaphor of "table legs" and "foot of the mountain". Aesthetic metaphor is deliberately created by users in order to produce emotional effects and highlight the meaning of things.
The basis of creation is the same attitude towards two or more things, not the similarity of objective attributes between things, although metaphor does not exclude the similarity of objective attributes.
"The outstretched hand of the forest/rock/playing with distant life/tears of bamboo roots/tears of pine needles/tears of cordate telosma and grass/tears of yam roots/intoxicating language on the tip of the tongue"
In these poems describing Gu Quan, the rock hand (forest/hand), pine needles and other tireless tears (spring water) obviously stay in the similarity of things (for example, tears and spring water are both liquid and transparent), which makes them just metaphors of language and play a decorative rhetorical role.
Linguistic metaphor with rhetorical function is a kind of word association. It ends in words, and its meaning ends in words. This metaphor, like simile in essence, appeared together with simile in a large number of so-called traditional new poems before the new period.
From this, it seems that the difference between the characteristics of poetry in the two periods lies in the difference between simile and metaphor-metaphor in modern poetry is a connection between contexts, which is always between the two: between one end and the other, between contexts;
Rummaging through the stone mountain
No Scorpion: This is a teenager.
When did this happen?
Now I'm back on this mountain.
The pine trees in the early years were already thick, but only in
Cracks and reddish brown on rocks
A scorpion cocked its tail.
Come to me.
Look into the scorpion's eyes
In a blink of an eye, I became a stone and sand at his feet.
In Wang Jiaxin's Scorpion, the scorpion, which appeared in the form of "invisible" at the beginning, was illuminated and displayed as a metaphor because it extended to the end of the poem "I became the stone sand at his feet in an instant".
As the center of metaphor, "Scorpion" develops a series of metaphorical images in the following. Without the concrete context of these contexts, metaphor exits the image.
Therefore, we are used to saying that an image is a metaphor directly, but only referring to the intangible (metaphor) with the tangible (image).
Judging from the sentence, metaphor is based on a series of unique rhetoric of the sentence "main subject". Unique rhetoric endows the "primary subject" with unique attributes-even the original objective attributes of things have now become subjective attributes-and these attributes have become a kind of meaning and metaphorical meaning under the action of a specific context.
"Subject" is the main image in a sentence? "Looking for stones all over the mountain/not seeing a scorpion: when and when did you become a teenager?" The main subject of this sentence is scorpion. Obviously, "scorpion" alone cannot constitute the metaphor we are seeing now. As a modifier of "scorpion" context, it is more important than "scorpion" in this respect, and of course it is more important than the implied "I".
In this sense, modern poetry grammatically turns the predicate-object complement into the subject-this is also the grammatical feature of poetry with images, metaphors and symbols.
In Scorpion, the sentence "I became the stone sand at his feet in an instant" attracted my attention, because it directly helped to explain that the meaning of metaphor in modern poetry came from epiphany; Metaphor in modern poetry is not only a substitution or rewriting of things, but also a riddle-like rhetorical device, but a direct recognition.
Direct identification is an attitude towards the world and its things, not a method to provide direct answers to the world and its things. Why am I looking for scorpions? What does scorpion mean? Wait, wait, there is no answer in the poem, and the answer is always late and at a loss. What the poem provides is only the moment when people meet the world.
According to Mikel Dufrenne, "meaning comes at the moment when people meet the world", so Scorpion must pursue meaning (namely, solution), but although readers can pursue it according to the metaphorical signifier of a poem (namely, the pronunciation of a symbol or its writing form), this pursuit is endless-there will always be someone who can put forward a new explanation for the same poem.
The loss of this fixed solution and the constant delay and vacancy of the solution in poetry are the modern characteristics of poetry metaphor. The answer (meaning) is transferred to the blank by metaphor, making it the center of the whole poem. The blank of meaning is necessary for poetry, which is common sense and needless to say.