Dec 30, 2009
“Trolling for Blues” could be styled a work whose metaphor takes over the poem and changes it into something other than what it started out to be. It is written in a five-line stanza of loose pentameters without rhyme. As it begins the poet talks to himself about metaphors: The “dapper terns” and the cloud that “moils in the sky” like an embryo are seen in human terms—humanity is projected upon them. (Only a person could be “dapper.”) Wilbur then analyzes his fish-is-like-man metaphor. Humans make the fish, he points out, a “mirror of our kind.” Immediately he...
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