Language Arts This article talks about what a metaphor is and different kinds of metaphors, including extended metaphors, personification, and mixed metaphors. The author also gives examples of metaphors in well-known literary works, such as those of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

From one perspective, language can be divided into literal language, which means exactly what it says, and figurative language, in which meaning is made, but not in a literal way. Metaphors - along with similes, hyperboles, syndecdoches, ironies, paradoxes, litotes, and euphemisms - are examples of figures of speech. To find out more about metaphors, continue reading this article.

What Are Metaphors?

The name metaphor comes from the Greek word metaphorein, meaning “to transfer.” A metaphor is a comparison that transfers meaning from one word or phrase to another or is made up of the other. They are similar to similes, but in similes the comparison is made explicit, usually by the use of the word like or as.

Here are two examples of metaphors uttered by the character Mr. Willoughby in Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility and called attention to by the speaker who is describing the effects on him of a letter he had from Marianne:

“Every line, every word was--in the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she here, would forbid--a dagger to my heart. To know that Marianne was in town was--in the same language-- a thunderbolt.”

Removing the interpolations and making things plain, the speaker uses two metaphors: 1) Each line and word of Marianne's  letter “was . . . a dagger to my heart”; 2) the knowledge that Marianne was in town was “a thunderbolt.” Austen has Mr. Willoughby use metaphors to suggest his overwrought reaction to the note he has received. The effect is stronger as metaphor than it would have been as simile, because the use of like or as would have muted the comparison, and stronger than literal language would have been as well.

Personification

Personification is classified as a separate figure of speech from metaphor, but if you think about it, personification is actually a type of extended metaphor. When Carl Sandburg writes in his poem “Fog” that “The fog comes / on little cat feet,” or when Emily Dickinson writes in the self-titled poem “Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me,” Sandburg is writing as if fog is a cat and Dickinson is writing as if Death is a traveler offering her a ride.

Mixed Metaphors

Mixed metaphors may occur when writers or speakers lose track of their references and say something that doesn't quite make sense or because they wish to create an effect that can only be achieved by creating a conflict between two or more disparate elements. Mixed metaphors can also be created purposefully for the sake of humor.

Someone once said to me that there would be “weeping and wailing of teeth.”  The person was trying to allude to quotations from the Bible that reference “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “Weeping and wailing” go together, but neither works very well with teeth. This is an example of a mixed metaphor.

Extended Metaphors

An extended metaphor is one that is drawn out to extend the effect. The world as a theatre or stage was a metaphor used by writers Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne and Thomas Heywood, but Shakespeare's extended metaphor in As You Like It II, vii, is the most extended and best remembered:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard;

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

There are several parts to this metaphor:

• the world is a stage

• the people who live are players with multiple roles

• their births are entrances and their deaths, exits

• people's lives are divided into acts

• the final scene of the final act involves loss of everything.

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