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Insights
Metaphor Sky was created to celebrate and share the significant contribution that metaphors make in our daily lives. Your insights and experiences have provided a major part of this celebration and sharing. Here, we will share your most recent insights and experiences as expressed on the contact page. We encourage you to write to us often.
...In connecting one object, event, or place, to another, a metaphor can uncover new and intriguing qualities of the original thing that we may not normally notice or even consider important. Metaphoric language is used in order to realize a new and different meaning. As an effect, a metaphor functions primarily to increase stylistic colorfulness and variety. Metaphor is a great contributor to poetry when the reader understands a likeness between two essentially different things. In his Poetics, Aristotle claims that for one to master the use of metaphor is “…a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” (The Poet's Dictionary). A metaphor may be found in a simple comparison or largely as the image of an entire poem. For example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” makes use of a series of comparisons between the speaker and a gun. Dickinson opens the work with the following: “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun - / In corners – till a Day / The Owner passed – identified - / And carried me away”. Of course, the narrator is not really a gun. The metaphor carries with it all the qualities of a “Loaded Gun”. The speaker in the poem is making a series of comparisons between themselves and the qualities of a gun. The narrator had been waiting a long time before their love found them. The narrator loves her fellow so desperately that she feels as a protective gun that would kill anyone wishing to harm him. To this effect, Dickinson writes, "To foe of His – I’m deadly foe –." Dickinson’s poem ends up being one extended comparison through the use of metaphor between herself and a gun with “…but the power to kill.” See A Handbook to Literature, The Poet’s Dictionary, or A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition). ...Andy Stamper, Student, University of North Carolina at Pembroke When we started this collection, we thought it might be a long, slow process. The opposite is true. Many metaphors are found in every book of poetry, wisdom, proverbs and quotations. ...Editors
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