Robert Frost's amazing "Bereft" contains one the most fascinating metaphors of all time: "Leaves got up in a coil and hissed / Blindly struck at my knee and missed."
“Where had I heard this wind before”
The speaker of the poem “Bereft” is alone in sorrow; he is so alone that he has “no one left but God.” The sixteen-line poem has the odd rime scheme of AAAAABBACCDDDEDE, but the rhythm is mesmerizing and complements the haunting grief of the subject. The first two lines begin the poem with a question: “Where had I heard this wind before / Change like this to a deeper roar?”
The man alone has become keenly aware of sounds, as one naturally does when occupying a dwelling as a solitary resident. Then he poses another question: “What would it take my standing there for, / Holding open a restive door, / Looking down hill to a frothy shore?” He wonders what this roaring wind would think of his just standing there dumbly at his door holding it open with wind pushing against it, while he stares blankly down at the lake that is being swirled up in billows by the same roaring wind.
“Summer was past and day was past”
The speaker next employs a couplet: “Summer was past and day was past. / Somber clouds in the west were massed.” His observation that summer is over, and it is the end of the day takes on more than the literal season and day designation; the speaker is referring metaphorically to his own age; his youth is gone and old age is upon him, as he sees the somber clouds symbolizing his own demise.
“Out in the porch's sagging floor”
The speaker moves out onto his porch which has a “sagging floor,” and that is when that absolutely inspired metaphor shows itself: “leaves got up in a coil and hissed, / Blindly struck at my knee and missed.”
The speaker is likening the leaves to a snake without mentioning the word “snake.” He simply portrays the leaves as a snake by dramatizing their action. The wind whipped the leaves up into a “coil,” and they aimed for the speaker’s knee, but before they would strike, the wind let them drop.
“Something sinister in the tone”
The whole scene is somber like those clouds what were amassing in the west, and now the speaker describes it as “sinister.” The tone of the wind’s deep roar, the porch sagging under time’s sway, the leaves behaving like a snake all add up to “something sinister.” Then the speaker surmises what is causing all this somber and sinister activity: the word is out that he is in the house alone. His secret has somehow gotten out.
But more important than his being in the house alone is the fact that he is in his “life” alone. The terrible secret that he “had no left but God” is causing the weather and seemingly insensible nature to behave in a “sinister” fashion just because they could, just because it is easy to frighten and intimidate a recently bereaved individual. The speaker’s state of being “Bereft” seemed to motivate all of nature to conspire against his state of mind.
