Metaphor in “Prodigy” by Charles Simic
Declan J. Broeg
ENGL:1200:0013
Andrew Williams
9/12/2016
“Prodigy” contains a beautiful extended metaphor between the game of chess and a time in Charles Simic’s life of great loss and suffering. “I grew up bent over/ a chessboard,” notions at chess, a game where two opposing sides fight for royalties, and a real life conflict of nations fighting for their lives , World War II. Charles Simic grew up in Yugoslavia, modern-day Serbia, in the early 1940’s where at that time the Nazi regime had invaded with “planes and tanks” that “shook windowpanes”. Throughout “Prodigy” Simic intertwines subjects about conflict and chess, giving a feeling that they were almost synonymous for him at this time in his life. The fact that Simic says specifically “It must have been in 1944” allows the reader to allude that he is in fact talking about World War II, but what does World War II have to with chess?
Throughout “Prodigy” Simic uses words and
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phrases to set a tone for the rest of the poem. The first phrase “I loved the word endgame,” is at the point in the poem where the reader is only thinking about chess. At first the reader may glance over it, but a second look sets a real dark tone. In chess one does not say “endgame” they say “check-mate”. Simic chose the word endgame to foreshadow to what he soon began to allude to, and that is World War II and Hitlers endgame. Hitler and Nazi officials often referred to the killing of all non-Arians as the endgame, therefore Simic and the rest of the Serbian people. Simic, however, uses the word love along with a term alluding to death. Why would Simic pair up such opposites, love and death? One may think that it is because at this time he would prefer to die and not live through such suffering. For Simic, dying would release him from this world and to the “white King”. Another phrase in “Prodigy” which adds to the already dark tone is “The white King was missing,” which is using the direct term of a chess piece, the white king, but what else is Simic trying to get through?
Simic states “The white King was missing,” rather than “The white king piece was missing” opening the mind to semantic difficulty. Simic wrote “The white King,” this could be taken as simply the piece of the chess set, but can also be taken as God. The color white is often seen as a symbol of innocence and also angelic, leading to “The missing God”. At this point in Simic’s life it is important to know that he has seen horrendous things in his homeland, such as mass executions and “men hung from telephone poles”. At this point, Simic had to think that God, “The white King”, had left him and his people. The fact that Simic believed God has left reiterates “The white King was missing” as to Simic, God had gone missing, allowing these horrible things to happen to him and the people he
loved. Charles Simic writes “Prodigy” comparing a time in his life that is so horrid and unimaginable to a complicated board game that simulates war. Simic writes “In chess, too, the professor told me,/the masters play blindfolded,” and he previously stated “The white King was missing,” as in God is no longer watching over. Therefore, it brings up the question, who is the master, better yet the great one, playing blindfolded on several boards? Who else, or what else, has equal or more power than God and would be able to control the board, or world, but with a darker sense of living, such as death and destruction?
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