Definition and Examples of Metaphor - Literary device

Tags: define metaphor, examples of metaphor,  what is a metaphor, metaphor definition, mixed metaphor, different types of metaphor, Literary Device, Literary Terms,

Definition and Examples of Metaphor - Literary device

A FIGURE OF SPEECH, an implied ANALOGY in which one thing is imaginatively compared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing. In a metaphor, the qualities of something are ascribed to something else, qualities that it ordinarily does not possess.

For example, in Song of Myself, Walt Whitman's striking metaphor for grass is "the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

In Beatrice Janosco's “The Garden Hose,” her metaphor for the hose is “a long green serpent / With its tail in the dahlias.”

Eve Merriam in "Metaphor" writes that “morning is / a new sheet of paper / for you to write on.”

In Edwin A. Hoey's "Foul Shout," hanging is a metaphor in the line “And two seconds hanging on the clock.”

I. A. Richards says this in Practical Criticism:

A metaphor is a shift, a carrying over of a word from its normal use to a new one. In a sense metaphor, the shift of the word, is occasioned and justified by a similarity or analogy between the object it is usually applied to and the new object. In an emotive metaphor the shift occurs through some similarity between the feelings the new situation and the normal situation arouse. The same word may, in different contexts, be either a sense or an emotive metaphor. If you call a man a swine, for example, it may be because his features resemble those of a pig, but it may be you have towards him something of the feeling you conventionally have towards pigs, or because you propose, if possible, to excite those feelings. Both metaphorical shifts may be combined simultaneously, and they often are.

A metaphor may be a single, isolated comparison, or it may be an extended metaphor that is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling IMAGE.

In Emily Dickinson's “Because I could not stop for Death" the journey in a carriage is an extended metaphor for our journey through life-childhood, maturity, death. An ALLEGORY could be considered an elaborate extended metaphor.

A dead metaphor is one that has been used so often it has ceased to be figurative and is taken literally: the head of the class, the eye of a needle, the cornerstone of her success.

A mixed metaphor combines two or more inconsistent metaphors in a single expression, often resulting in unintentional humor: “He'll have to take the bull by the horns to keep the business afloat" mixes an agricultural metaphor with a nautical one.

See ANALOGY, FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, IMAGE, SIMILE.

Tags: define metaphor, examples of metaphor,  what is a metaphor, metaphor definition, mixed metaphor, different types of metaphor, Literary Device, Literary Terms,