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RSSWhat is the Difference Between Metaphor and Simile?
The terms metaphor and simile are slung around as if they meant exactly the same thing.
A simile is a metaphor, but not all metaphors are similes.
Metaphor is the broader term. In a literary sense metaphor is a rhetorical device that transfers the sense or aspects of one word to another. For example:
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. — “The Highwayman,” Alfred Noyes
Here the moon is being compared to a sailing ship. The clouds are being compared to ocean waves. This is an apt comparison because sometimes banks of clouds shuttling past the moon cause the moon to appear to be moving and roiling clouds resemble churning water.
A simile is a type of metaphor in which the comparison is made with the use of the word like or its equivalent:
My love is like a red, red rose. — Robert Burns
This simile conveys some of the attributes of a rose to a woman: ruddy complexion, velvety skin, and fragrant scent.
She sat like Patience on a Monument, smiling at Grief. — Twelfth Night William Shakespeare
Here a woman is being compared to the allegorical statue on a tomb. The comparison evokes unhappiness, immobility, and gracefulness of posture and dress.
Some metaphors are apt. Some are not. The conscientious writer strives to come up with fresh metaphors.
A common fault of writing is to mix metaphors.
Before Uncle Jesse (Dukes of Hazzard) did it, some WWII general is reputed to have mixed the metaphor Don’t burn your bridges, meaning “Don’t alienate people who have been useful to you,” with Don’t cross that bridge before you come to it, meaning “Don’t worry about what might happen until it happens” to create the mixed metaphor: Don’t burn your bridges before you come to them.
Many metaphors are used so often that they have become cliché. We use them in speech, but the careful writer avoids them: hungry as a horse, as big as a house, hard as nails, as good as gold.
Some metaphors have been used so frequently as to lose their metaphorical qualities altogether. These are “dead metaphors.”
In our own time we have seen the word war slip into the state of a dead metaphor: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on AIDS. In these uses the word means little more than “efforts to get rid of” and not, as the OED has it:
Hostile contention by means of armed forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state; the employment of armed forces against a foreign power, or against an opposing party in the state.
In a sense, all language is metaphor because words are simply labels for things that exist in the world. We call something “a table” because we have to call it something, but the word is not the thing it names.
A simile is only one of dozens of specific types of metaphor. For a long and entertaining list of them, see the Wikipedia article on “Figure of Speech.”
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Any thoughts on “allegory” (since it was used in the post)? Seems to me (perhaps incorrectly) to be part of the same kettle of fish.
Great suggestion for a post. I’ll get on it. Thanks
I don’t know about this. Without metaphors, cliches, appositions, and tropes, reading blogs will not be as much fun.
My thinking is best to strike a balance. A little sprinkling may do the body (content) good.
I’m fairly sure that the simile “My love is like a red, red rose” is not describing a woman with a ruddy complexion who smells nice. Burns says in the next line that the aspect of the rose he is referring to is that it’s newly sprung in June. Thats it’s brand new and vibrant. Also, it’s not clear from the poem whether he is comparing a red rose to a woman or to the love he feels for the woman.
Any thoughts on strait and narrow versus straight and narrow. I have seen both.
Thanks. I’ve always had trouble keeping these two straight.
Lisa,
One aspect of poetic expression is ambiguity. Metaphors and symbols can be what’s called “multivalent.” That is, they can have more than one meaning. The dagger in the air that Macbeth sees before he kills Duncan is several things at once–his guilty conscience, his guilty purpose, and a hallucination. A metaphor is like a pebble dropped in water. It sends out circles of suggested meanings that stop only when the reader stops responding to them. The love the poet feels and the woman who is the object of it mingle. To see the image as applying to both the woman and the love she engenders in the poet is a valid interpretation.
Maeve,
Yes, the ambiguity is what is most fun about poetry. Whether Burns is talking about his love for the woman or the woman herself is indeed ambiguous and makes for an interesting poem. However, I still think you’re taking the poem too literally in saying the red rose refers to the way the woman looks. Any more than the next line, “My Luve’s like a melodie/that’s sweetly play’d in tune” refers literally to the sounds the woman makes. I think if you look at the first stanza as a whole, it conjures up the image of a woman who is young and vibrant and who makes the man feel transcendent, like music can. Not a red-faced woman who’s wearing perfume and walking around humming to herself.
A good piece. One caveat: the act of “naming”, the association of a sound to an object, is not metaphor. Perhaps a “sound map” would be a better description. No one would assert that the word table has legs
No one takes a word for the object. Thus, language is not “all metaphor”. A metaphor occurs when we take a word for another word—a literary device—, not a word for an object. Taking a word for an object is a form of magic, or literary realism; a delusion.