Metaphor in poetry, and how to write one that is yours
Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that says one thing is another thing outright, with no linking word such as like or as to soften it, so that everything true of the second thing is handed over to the first.
Told that a school corridor at half past three is a wind tunnel, a listener does not need to be told it is loud, cold and impossible to stand still in, because the second thing arrived carrying all three. That handover is the whole mechanism, and it is why metaphor is the first device most young writers are told to use and the first one most of them use badly.
What a metaphor does to a listener rather than to a reader
What a metaphor does to a listener is arrive once, whole, at the speed of speech, and never come back. A reader who misses the transfer can look at the line again; an audience cannot. Three rules follow. The second thing must already be in the audience's head, because there is no time to build it: a wind tunnel, a waiting room, a smoke alarm at 4 in the morning. The transfer must finish inside one breath, because a metaphor still under construction when the next line starts is only a confusing noun. And the second thing must be concrete, because an abstraction handed to an abstraction transfers nothing. Grief is a kind of absence moves a listener no distance, since absence is grief said again in a longer word.
Is poetry part of literature, and does that change what a metaphor is
Poetry is part of literature: it is one of the three main branches, alongside prose and drama, and literature is the body of work treated as an art rather than as information, whether it was written down or carried in the mouth. The difference between poetry and literature is not a difference of kind, it is the difference between a category and one of the things inside it.
So a metaphor is the same figure of speech in a novel, in a play and in a poem. What changes is how much room it has. In a novel an image can be planted in one chapter and paid off two hundred pages later; in a poem of twenty lines, and still more in a poem said out loud in 3 minutes, it has the lines around it and nothing else, so it has to be right first time and it has to be load bearing. That density is why The devices a young writer actually reaches for are all sharpened by the same pressure, with metaphor the most visible of them.
The four kinds of metaphor a young writer meets
Four kinds of metaphor cover nearly everything a young writer meets or writes, and they differ in how the transfer is delivered rather than in what it is made of. The fourth is a warning rather than a technique, and it is the one that turns up most in a first draft.
| The kind | How it is built | What it does to a listener | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct | says it outright: this thing is that thing | lands in one beat, with no setup | reaches for something grand and vague instead of something small and seen |
| Implied | never declares the comparison; the verb carries it, as when a room swallows somebody | works a fraction before the audience notices it working | too faint to survive a noisy room |
| Extended | one image developed across several lines or a whole poem | gives the poem a spine an audience can follow | the image runs out and the writer keeps going |
| Dead | worn so far into ordinary speech that nobody pictures it, such as time running out | nothing, because it passes as plain language | an image is borrowed where one was meant to be made |
A metaphor states the transfer and a simile admits it is a comparison, which is a smaller difference than most classrooms make of it and a real one on a stage. Metaphor or simile sets out where each is stronger, and why the choice is a question of speed rather than of quality.
How to write a metaphor that could only come from you
To write a metaphor that could only come from you, work from your own week rather than from other poems, because a borrowed metaphor is borrowed at the exact point where the poem was supposed to become yours.
- Name the thing you are actually writing about in the plainest words you own, with no image in the sentence.
- List everything you know about it that a stranger in the room would not know.
- Cross out every comparison on that list you have heard before, including the ones that sound impressive.
- Hunt for the second thing outside poetry: in a job, a kitchen, a bus route, a sport, a game you have played for years.
- Say the transfer out loud in one sentence and check what the second thing gives the first, in specifics.
- Cut the explanation, because a metaphor explained in the next line was not delivered in this one.
Step four separates writers. Everyone has storms, oceans and broken glass, so everyone writes them; almost nobody else has your grandmother's freezer or the smell of the bus depot. Inspiration here is not a mood, it is an inventory, and it is why one prompt makes fifty different poems in a room of fifty people.
How to test a metaphor that has stopped meaning anything
Test a metaphor that has stopped meaning anything with four checks, in this order, and cut on the first failure instead of rescuing the line. Picture it: if you cannot see the second thing in one frame, the audience will not either. Say it at performance volume, because dead metaphors survive silent reading and collapse when a mouth has to commit to them. Substitute it: if any other noun could stand in that slot without changing the poem, the noun was doing nothing. Then ask what the second thing gives the first and answer in one concrete word, because an answer such as sadness or power means the transfer never happened.
Watch the mixed metaphor too, where two images share a line and cancel each other. A listener trying to picture a door that is also a tide is not listening to the next line.
Writing about somebody else's metaphor
Writing about somebody else's metaphor, in a review of a collection or of a chapbook of roughly 20 to 40 pages, or in feedback to the person opposite you, is the same operation done out loud: name the image in the poet's own words, say what it transfers and to what, and say whether it survived being spoken. Both beat calling an image powerful, which gives a writer nothing to act on. Teaching poetry covers how an adult keeps that language in circulation without turning a session into marking.
Where metaphor sits in the workshop route
Metaphor sits at the revising stage of the route, not at the first draft. A draft written while hunting for images produces a poem made of images and about nothing, which is the commonest failure in the first week of a workshop. The order that works is to write the plain, true, slightly boring version, find the two or three sentences carrying the poem, and only then ask which of them is standing in for something else.
After that the device work spreads out. Anaphora gives the poem a shape to hang the images on, and imagery supplies the concrete detail a metaphor needs at both ends. Whether the poem is free verse, a piece built for a slam, or something read once at a lunchtime open mic, the metaphor does one job in all of them: it hands a listener one thing so that they receive another, in a single pass, at the speed a person can talk.