Intergrated Language Skills 1: Introduction to Textual Analysis Lesson 5 November 2, 2018
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Metaphor Types ď Ž
Here, we will mention the types of metaphor which are most frequent.
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The criterion for the classification is the way in which the tenor and the vehicle are connected.
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The Ground
We are also adding the notion of ground – the principle of comparison.
The ground is the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle.
The meaning of the metaphor is derived from the ground.
Extended Metaphor ď Ž
One common literary use of metaphor is the extended metaphor.
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Example 1 The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes, 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 it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. 5
Explanation: ď Ž
The shared properties of cats (the vehicle of the metaphor) and the fog (the tenor of the metaphor) are yellowness (if we are prepared to accept that cats may be yellow!), playfulness, wrapping around things, pressing against glass, wriggling into corners, moving silently and curling up to sleep.
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These are the grounds of the metaphor, which is extended because the comparison works at more than one level: the fog shares more than one quality with a cat.
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Another example of an extended metaphor is the Alice Walker poem ‘I’m really fond’:
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Example 2 I’m really very fond of you, he said. I don’t like fond. It sounds like something you would tell a dog. Give me love, or nothing. Throw your fond in a pond, I said. But what I felt for him was also warm, frisky, moist-mouthed, eager, and could swim away if forced to do so.
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Explanation: ď Ž
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I don’t like fond. /It sounds like something you would tell a dog is a simile; it introduces the vehicle of a dog into the poem; the narrator perceives the emotion her lover declares as more appropriate to a dog than a human. Although she uses the image of a dog to indicate her dislike of his emotion, she then turns the image to her own ends. 10
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This is done first by suggesting that he throw [s his] fond in a pond, playing with the idea of throwing sticks for dogs.
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Second, she elaborately compares herself to a dog, emphasizing her playfulness and her independence from him: warm, frisky, moist-mouthed, eager, and could swim away/if forced to do so.
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This metaphor therefore is exploited at length, with the different grounds for comparison between the narrator and a dog drawn out. 11
Anthropomorphic Metaphor
When animals, objects, or concepts are given specifically human attributes, this kind of metaphor is calles an anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism occurs very frequently in children’s books, where for example trains and animals have personalities and can talk. Another term used to describe this phenomenon is personification. Animated cartoon films like Tom and Jerry are also anthropomorphic. 12
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Poetic writers often use of this device, as in the following opening line to a sixteenthcentury sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney:
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Example 3 With how sad steps, O Moon, Thou climb’st the skies.
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Explanation: ď Ž
The narrator of the poem addresses the moon as if it were a person slowly climbing stairs.
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Another poet, W.B.Yeats, describes the emotion love as a person:
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Example 4 When you are old and grey and full of sleep‌ ‌And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
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Pathetic Fallacy ď Ž
Another form of metaphor that attributes human responses to the environment is called a pathetic fallacy.
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This refers to the practice of representing the world as a mirror reflecting human emotions.
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This was a device particularly exploited by writers in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, when the beauty and the power of nature was often a strong theme in literature.
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The effects produced can be very forceful, as the surrounding world echoes the feelings of the protagonists, as in this extract from Middlemarch, by George Eliot.
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The characters, Dorothea and Will, who are in love with one another, believe they are parting for ever: 19
Example 5 He took her hand, and raised it to his lips with something like a sob. But he stood with his hat and gloves in the other hand and might have done for the portrait of a Royalist. Still it was difficult to loose the hand, and Dorothea, withdrawing it in a confusion that distressed her, looked and moved away. ‘See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed’, she said, walking towards the window with only a dim sense of what she was doing…. While he [Will] was speaking there came a flash of lightning which lit each of them up for the other—and the light seemed to be the terror of a hopeless love. 20
Explanation: ď Ž
The dark clouds and the tossing trees can be read as metaphors for the unhappiness and confusion of the characters.
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A simile is used to make explicit the connection between the lightning and their hopeless love.
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The mixed metaphor It refers to “switching” metaphors within a description, so some kind of inconsistence is produced. To say someone was being taken on a wild goose chase up the garden path would be a mixed metaphor.
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A mixed metaphor is therefore a succession of incongruous or ludicrous comparisons. When two or more metaphors are jumbled together, often illogically, we say that these comparisons are "mixed."
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Bryan A. Garner offers this classic example of a mixed metaphor from a political speech held in the Irish Parliament: ď Ž
"Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But mark me, sir, I will nip him in the bud."
If the terms tenor, vehicle and ground are applied here, what happens in a mixed metaphor is that the tenor—the subject of the metaphor—stays the same, but the vehicle and ground change.
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The Dead Metaphor ď Ž
Another type of metaphor is the dead metaphor: a metaphor which has been absorbed into everyday language usage and which became naturalized, so that most language users are not aware of it as a metaphor any more.
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Common examples include the foot of a bed, or the foot of a page, a table leg, the arm of a chair: usages so everyday that their metaphorical origins are forgotten. More examples: face of a clock; hands of a clock, life is no bed of roses, etc. The meaning of some words has expanded to include their metaphorical usages, as is the case for the word clear, for instance.
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The literal meaning of clear is that light can pass through, as in clear water or clear glass. When an idea or an explanation are described as being clear, a mental process is being compared with the passage of light through something.
Is that clear? doesn’t mean can you see through it?, but metaphorically, is it comprehensible? 28
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This metaphor continues when we talk about ideas or a speaker being lucid or opaque.
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Our language is full of words which have been taken from one area of experience and then used to describe another experience
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It is possible to bring dead metaphors ‘back to life’, however.
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The poet Liz Lochhead is a good example of someone who takes everyday figures of speech, and makes them seem strange by breaking them down so that the reader has to think of them again, in a new way. She writes:
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Example 6 It’ll amaze you, the company I keep— and I’ll keep them at arm’s length— I’ve hauled my heart in off my sleeve.
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Explanation
There are two metaphors which would usually be considered ‘dead’ here: to keep at arm’s length and to wear your heart on your sleeve.
The two are combined in such a way as to call attention to themselves and to their exact phrasing. Keep is used twice, in the first line to suggest proximity, and in the second to suggest distance. 33