From the Desire Field

Figurative language refers to the use of words in a nonstandard or nonliteral way. It includes images, similes, and metaphors. Diaz uses figurative language frequently in this poem. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is identified with another, dissimilar thing, in a way that brings out a perhaps unexpected similarity between them. Similar to a metaphor, in a simile one thing is compared to another thing of a different kind. A simile can often be recognized by the use of the word “like” or “as.”

In Lines 4-6, Diaz writes metaphorically when her speaker states that something she focuses her mind on, “a wonder, a grief or a line of her,” is “a sticky and ruined / fruit to unfasten from” (Lines 5-6). The metaphor suggests the discomfort and difficulty of regaining psychic equilibrium after examining some gripping emotion or thing. There is also an implied metaphor of the speaker as an animal: “but sometimes when I get my horns in a thing” (Line 4). This is echoed later, when her mind in the dark is metaphorically identified as “una bestia” (Line 14).

Anxiety is presented metaphorically as a garden (Line 9). This produces a range of images and metaphors connected to nature; “worry,” for example, is presented in a metaphor as a flower, that is “ready to flower in my chest” (Line 12). The speaker at night “is a field” (Line 12) in which such things as desire grow and flourish. A similar metaphor is, “I am another night wandering the desire field” (Line 17). In a simile, insomnia is “like Spring” (Line 20) and is “many petaled” (Line 21). Continuing the metaphors drawn from nature, “the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow” (Line 22), are the many thoughts and desires she has during the sleepless night.

Successive images of “green” things beginning with “low green glow” (Line 18) and continuing in Lines 24-28, suggest nature in springtime as it greens the landscape. All these images are related to the physical body and to desire: “Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth” (Line 26)—the lack of a comma after “throat” to mark it off from the phrase that follows suggests the urgency of that desire, and the coexistence of these moments in their tangled lovemaking. Also, “green thorn in my eye” (Line 27) presents metaphorically a natural object—a thorn—which one might usually regard as an obstacle or difficulty (as in the idiom “a thorn in the side”), but reimagined through the word “green” as something positive. This suggests that in the light of the speaker’s desire for her lover, all emotions, even difficult ones, are welcome.