On Tropes: Why

A topic that has recently become of interest to me - or rather, recently returned to interesting me - is that of the trope, or standard form of expression, in poetry. This may perhaps be obvious from my immediately previous poems on Cupid, but those are only part of the reason this has bubbled up in my consciousness of late, and they might indeed be better thought of as an effect than a cause. I am interested in three things in this post: why we use tropes, how they work, and what effect they have on the poem. Clearly these are deeply interrelated, but I will treat them as separate questions at least formally, for the sake of organization. As I like shorter posts, I will split these apart: this is the post on why.

Why do we use tropes?

Tropes can be a sign of laziness: they are easy, they are shorthand, they are simple. But that can also mean efficiency: evoking a trope conjures up all sorts of things in the reader that would otherwise take up more space, more imagination, more effort, all of which could be spent (potentially) more productively on developing whatever the trope is supposed to bring with it than with duplicating the effect of the trope itself.
Tropes are also a form of cultural connectedness, of communal memory. I see a trope, and I recognize it, either from specific poems, songs, or other art, or from a general cultural and social awareness. This cannot be duplicated: Cupid has echoes that nothing else has, because he/it has accumulated them over years, generations, millennia of people using that term to express meaning. No original invention brings that baggage with it, for good or ill.

Tropes also enmesh us in historical connections; poems that rely on tropes can call on hosts of other poems that have also relied on the same tropes, can play off of them, give homage to them, or reject them, but always have access to them in a way that a poem that eschewed that trope - or chose another - cannot. A poet wishing to engage, either positively or negatively, with what has come before can hardly avoid the temptation to use a trope to do so.

There are many more reasons, I'm sure, that could be introduced here. I will suggest a final one before moving on to the next installment in this discussion: we use tropes because tropes developed for a reason. They are effective, moving, and deeply embedded in if not our psyches then our cultural memory. A trope can be an extremely useful tool for expressing what it wants to express; not only are they catchphrases, shorthand, or an engagement with the past, but they are also the image that they are, and that image is often extremely powerful in and of itself.