Symbol Analysis
This whole poem is basically an expansion on the metaphor in the first line. The comparison of the lightning to "a yellow Fork" (line 1) carries us immediately into an expanding world of homey imagery. Beginning with the bolt of lightning, the speaker makes us look upward, asking us to imagine a vast household scene above us, complete with an unseen being at a table who clumsily drops a fork.
The extended metaphor of the heavens as a kind of household makes the idea of a higher power both easier and harder to understand. On one hand, the speaker's use of familiar domestic images like a table set for a meal, and a clumsy hand dropping a fork, allows us to begin imagining the mysterious "mansions" in the sky. On the other hand, we can't see these mystery homes clearly, because they are, after all, neither "disclosed" nor "concealed" (lines 5-6).
- Line 1: The poem's opening gets us started on this domestic line of thinking. This metaphor depicts the striking lightning as a yellow fork, and the rest of the poem springs from this initial image.
- Line 2: Again we look upward from the falling fork and imagine the "Tables in the sky" it must have fallen from.
- Line 3: At those tables, there's clearly a diner that we can't see, whose "inadvertent fingers" stand in as a synecdoche for divine power – for God, that is. Interestingly, if we read the owner of those clumsy fingers to be God, that means God, in this poem at least, seems to have accidents at the dinner table just like the rest of us. Following this train of thought, we have to wonder what other kinds of things He might do inadvertently. ...
- Line 4-5: Again, the extended metaphor of the lightning bolt as a fork is reinforced (a piece of "awful Cutlery," which is kind of an awesome and hilarious phrase). The cutlery in question seems to belong to an enormous, not-quite-visible household somewhere up there.