Metaphor and Simile

Intuition [Beginner]

A metaphor says that one thing is another thing. A simile says that one thing is like another thing. Both make comparisons, but a metaphor collapses the distance between the two things, while a simile preserves it. When Robert Burns writes "O my Luve's like a red, red rose," he is using a simile -- the word "like" signals that the comparison is approximate. When Shakespeare writes "All the world's a stage," he is using a metaphor -- the world does not merely resemble a stage; for the purposes of the speech, it is a stage.

Metaphors are everywhere in language, even when we do not notice them. We say "the argument collapsed," "she attacked my position," "I defended my claim." These are metaphors from the domain of physical combat, mapped onto the domain of intellectual discourse. We process them so automatically that they feel literal. Linguists call these dead metaphors -- comparisons that have been used so often they have lost their figurative force.

Similes tend to feel gentler and more tentative than metaphors because the word "like" or "as" keeps the comparison at arm's length. "He fought like a lion" acknowledges a resemblance without claiming identity. "He was a lion in battle" merges the fighter and the animal. Neither is inherently better -- the choice depends on the effect the writer wants. Metaphors are bolder and more efficient; similes are more precise and harder to misinterpret. Homer's Iliad is famous for its extended similes (sometimes called Homeric similes) that unfold over many lines, comparing a battle scene to a natural phenomenon in patient detail.

An extended metaphor sustains the comparison across multiple sentences, paragraphs, or even an entire work. Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" develops the comparison between hope and a bird through three full stanzas, exploring what the bird does (sings in the storm), where it lives (in the soul), and how it responds to hardship (never asks for food). The extended metaphor allows a writer to explore multiple dimensions of a comparison rather than making a single point.

A mixed metaphor combines two or more incompatible comparisons, usually producing confusion or unintentional comedy. "We need to nip this in the bud before it snowballs" mixes a gardening metaphor with a weather metaphor. Writers generally avoid mixed metaphors, though they can be used deliberately for comic effect.

Visual [Beginner]

METAPHOR vs SIMILE: STRUCTURE

METAPHOR:  A IS B
  "Time is money."         -- time and money equated
  "The classroom was a zoo." -- classroom = zoo

SIMILE:    A IS LIKE B (uses "like" or "as")
  "Time flew by like an arrow."   -- comparison signaled
  "The classroom was loud as a rock concert."

EXTENDED METAPHOR: A IS B (developed across multiple lines)
  Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers"
  Stanza 1: hope = bird (sings)
  Stanza 2: hope = bird (perches in soul, sings in storm)
  Stanza 3: hope = bird (never asks for crumbs)

TYPES OF METAPHOR:
+----------------------+------------------------------------------+
| Type                 | Example                                  |
+----------------------+------------------------------------------+
| Standard             | "The moon was a ghostly galleon"        |
| Extended             | "All the world's a stage" (whole speech)|
| Dead (conventional)  | "The leg of the table"                  |
| Mixed (avoided)      | "Let's iron out the bottlenecks"        |
| Implied              | "I'm swimming in paperwork"             |
+----------------------+------------------------------------------+

Worked Example [Beginner]

Read this passage from Romeo's speech in Romeo and Juliet (Act I, Scene v):

"O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear -- Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear."

Step 1: Identify the comparisons. Line 1 contains a metaphor (implied): Juliet's brightness outshines the torches, so she "teaches" them -- personification mixed with metaphor. Line 2-3 contain a simile: Juliet "hangs upon the cheek of night / as a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear."

Step 2: Analyze the metaphor. Juliet is not literally teaching torches. The metaphor says she is so radiant that the torches learn from her. She is the standard; the torches are the students. This inverts the normal relationship (torches provide light) and elevates Juliet above her surroundings.

Step 3: Analyze the simile. The simile compares Juliet against the dark night to a bright jewel against dark skin. The comparison works through contrast: brightness stands out more vividly against darkness. The word "like" (implied by "As") makes this a simile rather than a direct metaphor.

Step 4: Evaluate the effect. The combined effect is to present Juliet as luminous, precious, and set apart from her surroundings. The metaphor gives energy (teaching, burning); the simile gives visual precision (jewel against dark skin). Together they create an impression of beauty that is almost overwhelming -- which is exactly Romeo's emotional state.

Check Your Understanding [Beginner]

Formal Definition [Intermediate+]

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one kind of object or idea is applied to another, thereby suggesting a likeness or analogy between them. Following I.A. Richards, metaphor is commonly analyzed as having a tenor (the underlying subject or idea being described) and a vehicle (the figurative term applied to it). In "the world is a stage," "the world" is the tenor and "a stage" is the vehicle. The interaction between tenor and vehicle produces meaning that belongs to neither term alone.

A simile is a specific type of metaphor in which the comparison is explicitly signaled by the words "like" or "as." The explicitness of the signal makes the comparison more transparent but also more controlled -- the reader is told that a comparison is happening, which limits the range of possible interpretations.

Subtypes

• Standard metaphor: A direct assertion of identity between tenor and vehicle ("Time is a thief").
• Implied metaphor: The vehicle is suggested rather than stated ("She batted her eyelashes" implies a butterfly or similar creature without naming it).
• Extended metaphor: A metaphor sustained and developed across multiple clauses, sentences, or an entire work. Also called a conceit when particularly elaborate or surprising (as in the metaphysical poets).
• Dead metaphor: A metaphor that has become so conventionalized that speakers no longer recognize it as figurative ("the mouth of a river," "the foot of a hill").
• Mixed metaphor: A combination of two or more incompatible metaphors, usually producing incoherence.
• Synesthetic metaphor: A metaphor that crosses sensory domains ("a loud shirt," "sweet music").
• Catachresis: A metaphor used to fill a gap in the vocabulary where no literal term exists ("the leg of a table").

Theoretical Accounts

• Substitution theory (classical): Metaphor is a decorative replacement for a literal expression. "Achilles is a lion" substitutes for "Achilles is brave."
• Comparison theory (Aristotelian): Metaphor is an abbreviated simile, asserting a comparison that could be expanded into literal form.
• Interaction theory (Black, 1954): Metaphor creates new meaning through the interaction of two "systems of associated commonplaces." The tenor and vehicle mutually modify each other.
• Cognitive theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980): Metaphor is not a linguistic decoration but a fundamental mechanism of thought. We understand abstract domains (time, love, argument) through mappings from concrete domains (money, journeys, war).

Key Concepts [Intermediate+]

Exercise 1. Using Richards's tenor/vehicle framework, analyze the following metaphors. For each, identify the tenor, the vehicle, and the specific grounds of the comparison (what features are mapped from vehicle to tenor).

• "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas." (Alfred Noyes)
• "Blanket of snow covered the town."
• "The detective assembled the puzzle of the crime."

Exercise 2. Explain the difference between Max Black's interaction theory and the classical substitution theory of metaphor. How does each account for the creation of new meaning? Provide an example where the interaction theory explains something that the substitution theory cannot.

Critical Theory [Master]

Formalist / New Critical approaches. The New Critics valued metaphor as a primary mechanism by which poetry achieves complexity and paradox. Cleanth Brooks saw metaphor as a way of holding together contradictory meanings in a unified structure. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity explored how metaphors generate multiple, simultaneous meanings that resist reduction to a single paraphrase.

Structuralist approaches. Roman Jakobson placed metaphor at one pole of a fundamental linguistic axis: metaphor operates through selection (substitution based on similarity), while metonymy operates through combination (contiguity). This binary maps onto broader cultural oppositions: romanticism (metaphoric) vs realism (metonymic), poetry vs prose, synchrony vs diachrony.

Post-structuralist approaches. Derrida's "White Mythology" deconstructs the metaphysical tradition's reliance on metaphors it has "forgotten" were figurative. For Derrida, there is no "literal" ground beneath the metaphors -- all language is ultimately tropological. Paul de Man extended this analysis, arguing that metaphor is not a cognitive tool but a linguistic effect that creates the illusion of knowledge. The deconstructive reading of metaphor reveals the instability of meaning that metaphor simultaneously produces and conceals.

Marxist approaches. Marxist critics examine how metaphors can naturalize or defamiliarize social relations. Bertolt Brecht used "alienation" techniques that included defamiliarizing metaphors to make capitalist social relations visible. Terry Eagleton analyzed how certain metaphorical frameworks ("the invisible hand," "trickle-down") serve ideological functions by encoding economic assumptions as natural features of the world.

Feminist approaches. Feminist theorists have analyzed the gender politics of metaphor. Adrienne Rich's "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" explores how metaphors of ownership, penetration, and enclosure encode patriarchal structures. Judith Butler's theory of performativity draws on the metaphoric structure of identity: gender is not a literal fact but a repeated performance that sustains the metaphor of a stable identity.

Postcolonial approaches. Postcolonial writers and critics analyze how colonial discourse uses metaphor to construct the colonized subject (as child, as animal, as disease) and how postcolonial writing uses counter-metaphors to resist these constructions. Salman Rushdie's metaphorical landscapes, for instance, create a literary space that refuses both colonial categorization and nationalist essentialism.

Reader-response approaches. Reader-response theorists emphasize that the meaning of a metaphor is not fully determined by the text but is realized through the act of reading. Wolfgang Iser's "gaps" apply to metaphor: the reader must construct the grounds of comparison, and different readers (or the same reader at different times) will construct different grounds.

Historical Context [Master]

The systematic study of metaphor begins with Aristotle, who defined it in the Poetics (1457b) as "the application of a word that belongs to another thing." Aristotle valued metaphor for its ability to teach through resemblance and considered mastery of metaphor a sign of genius, since it "cannot be learned from someone else."

In the Renaissance, metaphor became central to poetic theory. The English metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Marvell) developed the conceit -- an extended, elaborate metaphor that draws surprising connections between seemingly unrelated domains. Samuel Johnson criticized the metaphysical poets for their "heterogeneous ideas... yoked by violence together," but T.S. Eliot rehabilitated their reputation in the early twentieth century, valuing precisely the intellectual daring of their metaphors.

The eighteenth century saw a split. Enlightenment thinkers like Locke distrusted metaphor as a source of confusion, while Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge elevated it to a quasi-spiritual faculty. Coleridge's distinction between fancy (mechanical recombination) and imagination (the vital power that creates new unities) placed metaphor at the center of creative genius.

The twentieth century brought the most radical rethinking. Max Black's interaction theory (1954) rejected the idea that metaphor is merely decorative. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) demonstrated that metaphor pervades everyday thought, not just poetry. Their cognitive theory argued that abstract reasoning is structured by systematic metaphorical mappings (ARGUMENT IS WAR, TIME IS MONEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY). This work dissolved the boundary between literary and ordinary language use.

Bibliography [Master]

• Abrams, M.H. and Harpham, G.G. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Cengage, 2015.
• Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. Harvard UP, 1995.
• Black, Max. Models and Metaphors. Cornell UP, 1962.
• Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Grammar of Metaphor. Secker & Warburg, 1958.
• Cooper, David E. Metaphor. Blackwell, 1986.
• Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. Wiley, 2013.
• Derrida, Jacques. "White Mythology." New Literary History 6.1 (1974): 5-74.
• Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Chatto & Windus, 1930.
• Jakobson, Roman. "Two Aspects of Language." In Fundamentals of Language. Mouton, 1956.
• Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Ortony, Andrew, ed. Metaphor and Thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge UP, 1993.
• Richards, I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford UP, 1936.
• Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. Trans. Robert Czerny. U of Toronto P, 1977.
• Searle, John. "Metaphor." In Expression and Meaning. Cambridge UP, 1979.