Speaking Of Words: Metaphor Or Simile?

By Michael Ferber, Speaking of Words, InDepth NH

Google AI defines it this way: “A metaphor is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things to suggest a resemblance, without using ‘like’ or ‘as’.” That last phrase invokes the simile, which is a comparison that does use “like” or “as.” “My love is a red, red rose” is a metaphor, while “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile. Something like this pair of definitions is taught in the schools and found in most handbooks.

But Google AI seriously misleads us, and so do most handbooks. Metaphor does not “suggest” anything; it asserts something. And it is not resemblance it asserts but identity. “My love is a rose and that’s that.” It is therefore a lie, because my love is not literally a rose, it is only metaphorically a rose. If I said my love is like a rose, that would be literally true: in some respects—her beauty, her softness, her vulnerability, her fragrance, even her thorny side—she is rose-like. So metaphors are false and similes are true. But that is not what we are usually taught.

We can imagine someone saying “my love is literally a rose,” but that is to use “literally”
metaphorically, as an emphatic adverb, like “really.” James Joyce makes excellent use of it in the opening sentence of his great short story “The Dead”: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” But we should be wary of running the word “literally” off its feet this way in ordinary speech, because, in order to know a metaphor when we see one, we need to have an idea of the opposite of metaphor, namely, literal truth.

In ordinary speech we usually know that others are not really lying when they make a metaphor, and this is especially so when we meet metaphors in poetry, where they often gather. Sir Phillip Sidney wrote in 1595, “Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” We share a social compact that licenses poets to say things that they don’t really affirm; we relax our standards, you might say, in order to entertain the possibility that a metaphor may be true, or we enter into a world of metaphors without committing ourselves to its reality.

Let’s look at a few metaphors in poems.

“Old age is the sunset of life” (example of metaphor given by Aristotle)

“Life’s but a walking shadow” (Shakespeare)

“Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow

glaze” (William Carlos Williams)

They are not always in the form A = B. Sometimes they are in apposition (A, B):

“The god of war, money-changer of dead bodies” (Aeschylus)

“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— / In Corners” (Emily Dickinson)

Often they are in the form A of B, where A and B are both nouns:

“the path of our life” (Dante)

“the grapes of wrath” (Julia Ward Howe)

“the silent sabbath of the grave” (Charlotte Smith)

Adjective-noun structures are also common:

“rose-fingered Dawn” (Homer)

“the lazy leaden-stepping hours” (Milton)

“furnished souls” (E. E. Cummings)

Very effective sometimes are noun-verb forms:

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” (T. S. Eliot)

“time flicks out / its tricky whip” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

“Even the bees had knocked off for the day” (Billy Collins)

Or verb-noun forms:

“Some women marry houses” (Anne Sexton)

“I have been eating poetry” (Mark Strand)

There are many other grammatical structures in which metaphors roost, to make a noun-verb metaphor for a moment.

t is sometimes said that metaphors are more vivid than similes, and I would agree that when you add “like” or “as” you seem to take a little step back, even to apologize gently for your audacious equation. But look at these similes:

“With beauty like a tightened bow” (W. B. Yeats)

“When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (Eliot)

I sit in my chair / as quietly as a fuse” (Margaret Atwood)

These are vivid enough, even startling, though they are similes.

A more interesting contrast to metaphor is the figure of metonymy. In a metonymy, which is also literally a lie, an equation is asserted between two things that belong to the same realm, very often a part for a whole (called synecdoche). It was common in Greek and Latin poetry to use “roof” for “house,” and “house” for “family, as in “the House of Atreus.” The Supreme “Court” is nine people who meet in a large building. “Crown” and “throne” stand for the monarch who wears one and sits on the other. A metaphor, in contrast, asserts the identity of two things that belong to different realms. Hours and leaden feet belong in quite different spheres. Occasionally it is hard to tell at first which figure is invoked, but when Hamlet laments that his mother, so soon after his father’s death, could “post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets” (1.2.156-57), he is not accusing the bedsheets of strange metaphorical doings, as it might seem; the sheets are a metonym for what his mother is doing between them.

Both metaphors and metonyms can lose their figurative force. We speak of “dead” metaphors,” itself a dead metaphor, such as the “legs” of a table, the “head” of the stairs, or the “arms” of a chair, words that now seem to be the literal, even technical, terms. If we search the history of words or concepts, we find again and again that they arose as metaphors, usually by applying a physical or concrete meaning to an abstract idea. “Abstract” itself comes from the participial form of the Latin verb abstrahere, “draw off” or “take away”: as if we draw off or pare away material from a real thing until we get an outline of it. “Concept,” a fairly abstract concept itself, comes from the participial form of the verb concipere, from the root cap- “catch, seize, capture, grasp.” The German word for it is Begriff, which is akin to our word “grip.” “Comprehend” has a similar history. If we get the concept, we grasp it. Emerson wrote, “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”

What about our words for physical things, such as “bed” or “apple” or “child”? Are they dead metaphors too? We can’t trace most of them back to something more fundamental, but then we can’t trace any word farther back than about 5000 years ago, and language is much older than that. Did the first human speakers rely on metaphors to name things? It seems unlikely, but we’ll never know.

Whatever the case, we often rely on poets to bring dead metaphors to life. We may say we are “not wedded to” an idea or way of life, but Sexton rattles that phrase for us when she says we can marry a house. As for “way of life,” Dante and many other writers remind us that a way is a path, and it might lead us through forests and cities or over a cliff, and we might want to choose the road less traveled by. So invite a poet to dinner now and then to freshen up your stale metaphors. Your guest might note that your four-legged table is a quadruped, like your dog, and you might gain wonderful new ideas about it. So might your dog.

* * *

I go into the subject of metaphor more thoroughly in a chapter of my book Poetry and Language. I can also recommend a new book (a short one) by Fredric V. Bogel, A Theory of Metaphor.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.