Welcome to this lecture headed “METAPHOR”. We will be discussing all about metaphor. Enjoy your lecture.
Metaphor is a figure of speech which makes an understood, indirect or hidden contrast between two things or objects that are poles apart from each other but have a few characteristics common between them. In other words, a similarity of two contradictory or dissimilar objects is made based on a single or a number of widespread characteristics.
In simple English, when you depict a person, place, thing, or an action as being something else, even though it is not really that “something else,” you are speaking metaphorically.
To say something like “He is the black sheep of the family” is a metaphor due to the fact that he is not a sheep and is not even black.
However, we can make use of this comparison to explain a connection of a black sheep with that person.
A black sheep is an strange animal and characteristically stays away from the herd, and the person you are relating shares comparable personality.
Furthermore, a metaphor forms a comparison which is dissimilar to a simile i.e.
We do not make use of “like” or “as” to develop a comparison in a metaphor.
It in point of fact creates an implicit or hidden contrast and not an precise one.
Ordinary Speech Examples of Metaphors
Majority of people consider metaphor as a device used in songs or poems alone, and that it has nothing to do with our day to life.
In fact, all of us in our daily life routine speak, write and think in metaphors. We cannot do without them.
Metaphors are from time to time formed through our common language. They are known as conservative metaphors.
Calling a person a “night owl” or an “early bird” or saying “life is a journey” are frequently used metaphor used in our day to day life that is vividly understood by the majority of people.
Below are a number of more everyday metaphors we frequently hear in our daily life:
My brother was boiling mad. (This means he was very angry.)
The exam was a breeze. (This means that the exam was not difficult.)
It is going to be clear skies today. (This means that clear skies are not a menace and life is going to be without suffering)
The skies of his future started to darken. (Darkness is a threat; consequently, this means that the coming times are going to be difficult for him.)
Her voice is music to his ears. (This means that her voice makes him feel happy)
Examples of Literary Metaphor
Metaphors are used in every form of literature but not frequently to the degree they are used in poetry due to the fact that poems are meant to talk about multifaceted images and feelings to the readers and metaphors frequently state the comparisons most persuasively. Below are 2 examples of metaphor from popular poems.
“Shall I Compare Thee to a summer’s Day”,
William Shakespeare was the best supporter of the use of metaphors. His poetical works and dramas all make broad use of metaphors.
“Sonnet 18,” as well referred to as “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day,” is an extended metaphor between the love of the speaker and the justice of the summer season.
He writes that “thy eternal summer,” here it meant that the love of the subject, “shall not fade.”
Example 2
“Before high-pil’d books, in charact’ry / Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain,”
The great Romantic poet John Keats endured great losses in his life – the death of his father in an accident, and of his mother and brother through tuberculosis.
When he began showing signs of tuberculosis himself at the age of 22, he wrote “When I Have Fears,” a poem rich with metaphors relating to life and death.
In the line “before high-pil’d books, in charact’ry / Hold like rich garner the full-ripened grain”, he uses a double-metaphor.
Writing poetry is unreservedly compared with reaping and sowing, and both these acts stand for the barrenness of a life unfulfilled imaginatively.
Uses of Metaphors
The use of metaphors appropriate metaphors appeals directly to the senses of listeners or readers, sharpening their imaginations to comprehend what is being communicated to them.
Moreover, it gives a life-like quality to our conversations and to the characters of the fiction or poetry.
Metaphors are also ways of thinking, offering the listeners and the readers’ fresh ways of probing ideas and seeing the world.
Examples of Metaphor for Love
Love is a nutrient
Love is a journey
Love is a fluid in a container
Love is fire
Love is an economic exchange
Love is a natural force
Love is a physical force
Love is a captive animal
Love is war
Love is a social superior
Love is rapture
Love is a thrill ride
Love is a fine wine
Love is a garden
Love is a battlefield
Love is an experiment
Love is a fragile flower opening to the warmth of spring
Love is a lemon – either bitter or sweet
Examples of Metaphor from renowned People
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” –Pablo Picasso
“Conscience is a man’s compass.” – Vincent Van Gogh
“Chaos is a friend of mine.” – Bob Dylan
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” – Albert Einstein
Frequently Used Metaphors
Anger bottled up inside
A shot across the bows
An endless night
Apple of my eye
Belling the cat
Better half
Birds of a feather flock together
Blanket of air
Blanket of bullets
Blanket of clouds
Blanket of exemption
Blanket of flowers
Blanket of ghosts
Blanket of hope
Blanket of love
Blanket of roses
Blanket of snow
Blanket of stars
Blow one’s trumpet
Boiling frog
Boiling mad
Broken heart
Cold feet
Consumed by love
Copper bottomed
Cotton candy words
Couch Potato
Crop of students
Deep dark secret
Disaster area
Domino effect
Early bird
Eyes were fireflies
Eyes were saucers
Flogging a dead horse
Food for thought
Fork in the road
Full to the gunwales
Give a wide berth
Go by the board
Hand over fist
Hard and fast
He got all steamed up
He was a Lion on the battle field
High and dry
His eye on the Sparrow
Home was prison
Homework is a breeze
House of Cards
Hungry ghost
Ideas are water
Ideas are wings
Ideas in motion
Infinite crisis
Infinite spectrum of possibilities
Intimate relationship
Jumping the shark
Life is a journey
Love is a bond
Love is a camera, full of memories
Love is an experiment
Love is an ocean
When Ninja Robot Squad came on TV, the boys were glued in their seats.
Words are the weapons with which we wound.
Point of no return
Profits fell last year
Puppet government
Push the boat out
Rolling in dough
Roof of the World
Rug Rats
She let such beautiful pearls of wisdom slip from her mouth without even knowing
Sea of sadness
Sea of smiles
The detective listened to her tales with a wooden face.
Life is a mere dream
Life is a struggle
Light of my life
Loose cannon
Love is a battlefield
She was fairly certain that life was a fashion show.
Rainbow of challenges
Rainbow of flavors
Rainbow of hope
Rainbow of love
Raining cats and dogs
Reality an enemy
Roller-coaster of emotions
The typical teenage boy’s room is a disaster area.
Sea of sorrows
Sea of umbrellas
Sea of uncertainty
Kisses are the flowers of love in bloom.
His cotton candy words did not appeal to her taste.
Love is a fine wine
Love is a garden
Love is a growing garland
Love is a journey
Love is a thrill ride
Kathy arrived at the grocery store with an army of children.
Her eyes were fireflies
Shades of excellence
Shades of hope
Men court not death when there are sweets still left in life to taste.
Fame is the fragrance of heroic deeds, / Of flowers of chivalry and not of weeds!
Shake a leg
Simmer down!
Slippery slope
Let your eyes drink up that milkshake sky.
The drums of time have rolled and ceased.
Her hope was a fragile seed.
Scars are the roadmap to the soul.
The Moo Cow’s tail is a piece of rope all raveled out where it grows.
My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee.
The clouds sailed across the sky.
The light flows into the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.
Smell of death
Smell of fear
She cut him down with her words.
The daggers of heat pierced through his black t-shirt.
Spherical cow
Stable economy
So I sit spinning still, round this decaying form, the fine threads of rare and subtle thought.
Smoking gun
Snake oil
Stable marriage problem
He wanted to set sail on the ocean of love but he just wasted away in the desert.
I was lost in a sea of nameless faces.
The path of resentment is easier to travel than the road to forgiveness.
Katie’s plan to get into college was a house of cards on a crooked table.
The wheels of justice turn slowly.
Hope shines–a pebble in the gloom.
Sweet dreams
Sweet smell of success
Tell it to the marines
The bitter end
The cut of your jib
The evening of one’s life
The sea bit my ankles
Their ideas are difficult to swallow
And swish of rope and ring of chain
Are music to men who sail the main.
Still sits the school-house by the road, a ragged beggar sunning.
The child was our lone prayer to an empty sky.
Thoughts are a storm, unexpected
Walk the plank
Wave of donations
Wheels of justice
Work has dried up
Metaphors from Literature
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” –William Shakespeare
“I am the good shepherd…and I lay down my life for the sheep.” The Bible, John 10:14-15.
Thanks for reaching to this point marking the end of this lecture.
Your Lecture Master:
Mst. Ugonwanne Joshua
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