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Poetry: Tenor, Ground and Vehicle
How can you figure out a metaphor or simile if it does not make sense at first?
Well, you break the metaphor or simile into tenor, vehicle and ground.
What does that mean?
Let’s look at Langston Hughes’s poem “Dreams.”
Dreams
Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Tenor
The tenor of a metaphor or simile is the thing being described.
OK, in this poem, Langston Hughes is trying to describe what?
He is trying to describe dead dreams—the kind we have lost for our future. Thus, for the first
stanza, life with dead dreams is being compared to a broken-winged bird. What does he mean by
that?
Vehicle
The vehicle of a metaphor or simile is the new meaning that the poet is attaching to the tenor.
Vehicles carry things; thus, the vehicle of a metaphor carries new meaning.
So, the vehicle of Hughes’ metaphor is a “broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
Ground
The meaning of a metaphor lies in the similarities between what is being described and what is
used to describe it. This is the ground of a metaphor. So then, what do broken-winged birds and
living with dead dreams have in common?
Make lists for the following:
What are some traits of living with dead dreams?
What are some traits of a broken-winged bird?
What are the traits that overlap in your lists?
This overlap is the ground, the meaning the poet intended to convey with the metaphor.