Hall’s Index

An Essay

A young poet friend calls my letters the Dead Metaphor Bulletin. It is possible that I am a crank about dead metaphors. Another friend sent me a completed manuscript, which I read with pleasure, and when I wrote him I congratulated him on writing a long book with only four dead metaphors in it. They were the usual things, often nouns used as verbs, often monosyllabic or disyllabic, often taking their origins from archaic sources—words like shield, cradle, plough, and dart. In minor pique, he answered me alluding to “Hall’s Index.”

The phrase dead metaphor is a dead metaphor, henceforth known as DM. The phrase implies that the metaphor was once a living organism, like a human being, but died and became a corpse. When we use such words in our poems, we populate DM our poems with zombies.