Metaphor, simile, analogy: which one you actually want
Metaphor or simile
A metaphor states that one thing is another thing, while an analogy explains one thing by walking a listener through the ways it resembles another, and the difference between them is distance: the metaphor makes the leap in a single move and leaves the joining to the listener, while the analogy carries the listener across step by step.
A simile travels the shortest distance of the three, marking the comparison with like or as so that both halves stay visible at once and the listener is told in advance how far the resemblance runs. The word like is not what separates them. The distance a listener has to travel is what separates them, and that distance is a decision made on purpose, before the line is written and again while it is being cut.
The same idea, written four ways
The same idea written four ways shows the difference faster than four definitions do. Below is one idea, the minute before somebody speaks at a microphone, put through the four figures a young writer is most likely to be choosing between. Nothing in the idea changes; what changes is how far the listener has to come to meet it.
| Figure | The same idea, written that way | What the listener does | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simile | The minute before I speak is like the edge of cold water | Accepts a comparison handed over already labelled | Short, and safe |
| Metaphor | The minute before I speak is cold water | Makes the jump, and does the joining unaided | Long, in one move |
| Personification | The minute before I speak holds its breath and will not give mine back | Grants the minute a body and a will | Long, at one target |
| Analogy | The minute before I speak works the way cold water does: the body argues, then you go in, and two strokes later the argument is over | Follows a mapping laid out for them | Long, in stages |
A room hears one of those, once. The simile is the version nobody misunderstands and nobody repeats afterwards. The metaphor risks losing anyone who is half listening, and it is the only one of the four that can make somebody sit forward. The analogy is the safest choice when the idea is genuinely new to an audience, which is also why it is the wrong choice at the end of a poem: an explanation is not an ending.
Metaphor and simile: what each one actually claims
A metaphor and a simile both claim a resemblance, and they differ in how much of the claim is handed to the listener. A simile keeps its two halves apart and puts a bridge between them, so the audience is told a resemblance exists and told roughly how far it runs. A metaphor removes the bridge and asserts identity, so how far the resemblance runs is left for the audience to settle. Aristotle described the device in the Poetics, in the 4th century BC, as giving a thing a name belonging to something else, and the Greek word behind it means carrying across.
Neither is more literary than the other, and a simile is not a beginner's metaphor. A simile buys precision, because it can qualify itself, and pays in force. A metaphor buys force and pays in control, since a listener who does not follow hears a strange sentence and moves on. The device on its own, with the exercises that get a writer past the second-hand version of it, is the subject of Metaphor.
Can a metaphor be personification, and where symbol, allegory and metonymy sit
Yes, a metaphor can be personification, because personification is a metaphor with a fixed target: it takes something with no human capacity and gives it one. The rest of the family sorts out quickly once that is clear, and it is worth sorting, because these terms get used at each other until nobody is sure which one is on the page in front of them.
- Personification: gives a human action, feeling or will to something that has none, such as a city that waits or a phone that refuses.
- Symbol: lets one concrete thing stand for a larger idea across a whole poem, without ever saying so.
- Allegory: runs a whole narrative on two levels at once, so every element of the story maps onto something outside it.
- Metonymy: swaps in a closely associated thing, such as the stage for a career, and compares nothing at all.
- Hyperbole: overstates on purpose, and expects to be believed about the feeling rather than about the fact.
The line worth holding is between comparison and association. Metaphor, simile, analogy and personification all compare; metonymy substitutes. That is why a poem full of metonymy sounds sharp and a poem full of metaphor sounds hot.
Choosing the distance on purpose
Choosing the distance on purpose comes down to three questions. How new is the idea to this audience, because somebody meeting it for the first time needs a shorter distance. How much attention does the poem already hold, because a long jump in the third line loses people a good ending would have kept. And how many times will the comparison be used, because one sustained across a whole poem, of the kind a sonnet carries over 14 lines, has to survive being looked at.
A comparison sustained like that has its own name, the conceit, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, one of the 154 in his sequence, is the familiar case: it proposes a comparison in the first line and then argues with it for the rest of the poem. A comparison worth repeating can also be mounted on the same opening words, line after line, which is Anaphora, and that combination is common in work written for a stage because a room learns the shape and then feels it break. Test the distance out loud before The open mic, since a room hears the line once and cannot ask what you meant. The rest of the moves a poem is built from sit together on The devices a young writer actually reaches for.
Writing your own metaphor for something you actually know
To write your own metaphor rather than borrow one, start from the thing you know and not from the idea you want to express. Life, love, time and grief produce the most second-hand comparisons in any workshop, because everybody has already heard what life supposedly is, so a writer reaching for a metaphor for life is usually reaching for somebody else's.
- Name the thing you actually mean, in one plain sentence, with no image in it at all.
- List everything physical you know about it, including what it smells like and what it weighs.
- Find a second thing that shares one of those physical facts and shares nothing else.
- Write the sentence as a simile, as a metaphor and as a personification, and say all three out loud.
- Keep the one that made you uncomfortable, and cut the explanation you added underneath it.
The test at the end is the test at the start. If a listener travels no distance, the line is decoration; if they cannot get there at all, the line is private. A comparison that is yours sits between those two.