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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