FIGURE OF SPEECH BY COMPARISON
(1) Metaphor
Robert Herrick
EXERCISES:
Sylvia Plath
Her Legs
Marge Piercy
Metaphors
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
(2) Simile
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
-Anonymous
It is beauteous evening, calm and free.
The holy time is quiet as a Nun,
Breathless with adoration.
-Shakespeare
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child
-Wordsworth
Seems he a dove? His feathers are but borrowed.
-Shakespeare
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg.
(3) Personification
The Wind (James Stephens)
The wind stood up and gave a shout.
He whistled on his fingers and
Kicked the withered leaves about
And thumped the branches with his hand
And said he’d kill and kill and kill,
And so he will and so he will.
(4) Apostrophe
Western wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
(Anon.)
A Work of Artifice
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
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FIGURE OF SPEECH BY COMPARISON
SIMILE (N Scott Momaday)
Alfred Lord Tennyson
What did we say to each other
that now we are as the deer
who walk in single file
with heads high
with ears forward
with eyes watchful
with hooves always placed on firm ground
in whose limbs there is latent flight.
THE EAGLE
AR Ammons (1926-2001)
COWARD
Bravery runs in my family.
HD Doolitle (1886-1961)
THE POOL
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you – banded one?
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
HE watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Nor cleaned the blood, nor set the fractured
bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged down by want past resolution’s
power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Louis Simpson
William Carlos William
American Poetry
TO WAKEN AN OLD LADY
Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons and poems.
Old lady is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind –
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely hands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (American; 18921950)
Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
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FIGURE OF SPEECH BY COMPARISON
CK Williams (b.1936) HOOD
Remember me?
I was the one you were always afraid of.
I kept cigarettes in my sleeve, wore
engineer’s boots, long hair, my collar
up in back and there were always
girls with me in the hallways.
You were nothing. I had it in for you –
when I peeled rubber at the lights
you cringed like a teacher.
And when I crashed and broke both lungs
on the wheel, you were so relieved
that you stroked the hard Ford paint
like a breast and your hands shook.
Sleep is reconciling,
A rest that peace begets:
Doth not the sun rise smiling
When fair at ev’n he sets?
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,
Melt not in weeping,
While she lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.
(Anonymous)
Shakespeare
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly,
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere
folly:
Then, heigh ho, the holly,
This life is most jolly.
William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending; we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. – Great God, I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
SOME DEFINITIONS:
 Figurative language is used not in the literal
sense but in an imaginative way. It is a
deviation from what a speaker of a language
apprehend as the ordinary, or “standard
significance or sequence of words, in order
to achieve some special meaning or effect”
(Abrams, 1971:60)
 Metaphor (Greek: carrying from one place to
another) : a statement that one thing is
something else, which, in a literal sense, it is
not. By asserting that a thing is something
else, a metaphor creates a close connection
in mind between the two entities and usually
underscores some important similarity
between them. For example: “Howard is a
pig.”
 Simile (Latin: like): a comparison of two
things, indicated by some connective, usually
like as, than, or verb such as resembles. A
simile usually compares two things that
initially seem unlike but are shown to have a
significant resemblance. For example: “Cool
as a cucumber” and “My love is like a red,
red rose.”
 Personification (Latin: mask) : a figure of
speech in which a thing, an animal, or an
abstract term is endowed with human
characteristics. Personification allows an
author to dramatize the non-human world in
tangibly human terms.
 Apostrophe (Greek: turning away): a direct
address to someone or something. In poetry
a apostrophe often addresses something not
ordinarily spoken to (e.g. “O Mountain”). In
an apostrophe, a speaker may address an
inanimate object, a dead or absent person, an
abstract thing, or a spirit. Apostrophe is
often used to provide a speaker with means
to articulate thought aloud.
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