Extended metaphor
An extended metaphor, also known as a conceit or sustained metaphor, is the use of a single metaphor or analogy at length in a work of literature. It differs from a mere metaphor in its length, and in having more than one single point of contact between the object described (tenor) and the comparison used to describe it (vehicle).[1][2] These implications are repeatedly emphasized, discovered, rediscovered, and progressed in new ways.[2]
In English literature the term is generally associated with the 17th-century metaphysical poets, an extension of contemporary usage. The metaphysical conceit differs from an extended analogy in the sense that it does not have a clear-cut relationship between the things being compared.[3] Helen Gardner[4] observed that "a conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness" and that "a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness." An example of the latter occurs in John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", in which a couple faced with absence from each other is likened to a pair of compasses.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The metaphysical conceit is often imaginative, exploring specific parts of an experience.[5] John Donne's "The Flea" is a poem seemingly about fleas in a bed. When Sir Philip Sidney begins a sonnet with the conventional idiomatic expression "My true-love hath my heart and I have his",[6] he takes the metaphor literally and teases out a number of literal possibilities in the exchange of hearts. The result is a fully formed conceit.
Petrarchan
The Petrarchan conceit is a form of love poetry wherein a man's love interest is referred to in hyperbole. For instance, the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and his mistress is either "a cloud of dark disdain" or the sun.[7]
The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using oxymoron, for instance uniting peace and war, burning and freezing, and so forth. But images which were novel in the sonnets of Petrarch, in his innovative exploration of human feelings, became clichés in the poetry of later imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed Petrarchan conceits when describing his love for Rosaline as "bright smoke, cold fire, sick health".
Etymology
In the Renaissance, the term (which is related to the word concept) indicated any particularly fanciful expression of wit, and was later used pejoratively of outlandish poetic metaphors.
Recent literary critics have used the term to mean simply the style of extended and heightened metaphor common in the Renaissance and particularly in the 17th century, without any particular indication of value. Within this critical sense, the Princeton Encyclopedia makes a distinction between two kinds of conceit: the Metaphysical conceit, described above, and the Petrarchan conceit. In the latter, human experiences are described in terms of an outsized metaphor (a kind of metaphorical hyperbole), like the stock comparison of eyes to the sun, which Shakespeare makes light of in his Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."
Examples
William Shakespeare
In Sonnet 18 the speaker offers an extended metaphor which compares his love to Summer.[8] Shakespeare also makes use of extended metaphors in Romeo and Juliet, most notably in the balcony scene where Romeo offers an extended metaphor comparing Juliet to the sun.
- It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
- Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
- Who is already sick and pale with grief,
- That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
- Be not her maid, since she is envious;
- Her vestal livery is but sick and green
- And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.[9]
T. S. Eliot
In the following passage from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", T. S. Eliot provides another example of an extended metaphor:
- The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
- The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
- Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
- Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
- Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
- Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
- And seeing that it was a soft October night,
- Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.[10]
Qualities (grounds) that we associate with cats (vehicle), color, rubbing, muzzling, licking, slipping, leaping, curling, sleeping, are used to describe the fog (tenor).[1]
Robert Frost
The commonly used "life-is-a-journey" metaphor conceptualized by Lakoff and Johnson (1980 and 1989)[11][12] is extended in Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". An excerpt is provided below:
- I shall be telling this with a sigh
- Somewhere ages and ages hence:
- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
- I took the one less traveled by,
- And that has made all the difference.[13]
This poem can be understood if the reader has knowledge of the "life-is-a-journey" metaphor. That knowledge includes understanding of other grounds between the tenor (life) and vehicle (journey) that are not as transparent in this poem. Holyoak (2005) gives examples of these grounds, "person is a traveler, purposes are destinations, actions are routes, difficulties in life are impediments to travel, counselors are guides, and progress is the distance traveled".[14]
Walt Whitman
Whitman's O Captain! My Captain! uses the extended metaphor of Abraham Lincoln as the captain of the 'ship' that is the United States of America.
See also
References
- ^ a b Thornborrow, Joanna; Wareing, Shân (1998). Patterns in Language: An Introduction to Language and Literary Style. Psychology Press. pp. 103–104. ISBN 0415140641.
- ^ a b Brummett, Barry (2009). Techniques of Close Reading. SAGE. pp. 81–82. ISBN 978-1412972659.
- ^ Stephen Cushman; Clare Cavanagh; Jahan Ramazani; Paul Rouzer (26 August 2012). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition. Princeton University Press. p. 290. ISBN 978-1-4008-4142-4.
- ^ Helen Gardner (1961) The Metaphysical Poets (Oxford University Press) "Introduction" p. xxiii.
- ^ Robert H. Ray (1998). An Andrew Marvell Companion. Taylor & Francis. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-8240-6248-4.
- ^ "Sir Philip Sidney. "My true love hath my heart, and I have his." Love sonnet from "Arcadia."". Luminarium.org. Retrieved 2013-07-05.
- ^ Najat Ismaeel Sayakhan (8 July 2014). THE TEACHING PROBLEMS OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS. Author House. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-4969-8399-2.
- ^ Aubusson, Peter J.; Harrison, Allan G.; Ritchie, Stephen M. (2005). Metaphor and Analogy in Science Education. Springer. pp. 3–4. ISBN 1402038291.
- ^ "Romeo and Juliet". The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 4 November 2012.
- ^ Eliot, T.S. "1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Prufrock and Other Observations. Bartleby.com. Retrieved 4 November 2012.
- ^ Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226468011.
- ^ Lakoff, George; Turner, Mark (1989). More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226468127.
- ^ Frost, Robert. "The Road Not Taken". Bartleby.com. Retrieved 4 November 2012.
- ^ Holyoak, Keith J.; Morrison, Robert G. (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521824176.
- Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. (1989) More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Princeton, NJ: University of Chicago Press
- Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan. (1993) The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
External links
