This Document Contains the Following Sections (Separated by Page Breaks)

Metaphor 101

This document contains the following sections (separated by page breaks):

• Overview
• Metaphor in general
• Personification
• Iconicity
• Works Cited

Overview of Metaphor 101

These materials consist of:

• A general presentation about metaphor, with examples of daily and poetic use
• A specific presentation about personification
• A specific presentation about iconicity

You can use this presentation in a variety of ways. It is not text- or unit- specific, so it can be used as a stand-alone presentation to introduce students to metaphor. It was originally created to be used with the “Borders and Metaphor” semester plan in its entirety or with any one of the individual units created for that semester plan. The first few sections of the presentation are general in nature, to give students an overview of how our culture uses metaphor and how writers use metaphor for poetic purposes. There are additional presentations that can be used for deeper inquiry into two specific types of metaphor, personification and iconicity. These types of metaphor are examined in specific texts within the “Borders and Metaphor” semester plan.

In addition to this presentation, selected readings on metaphor are available on Electronic Reserves: “Concepts We Live By, and more” (an overview), “The Metaphoric Structure of a Single Poem” (a more specific and more difficult text), “Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the gulf” (regarding the first war in the gulf) and “Metaphor and War, Again” (an additional response to the more recent war in the gulf, written in March 2003)

Metaphor 101: Metaphor in General

The Basics

What we do:

Lakoff and Johnson tell us “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5). That is, we draw correspondences between two conceptual domains that seem to have similarities. This is called “mapping.” Metaphor is called a poetic device, yet we use metaphors, unconsciously and automatically, every day.

TWO EXAMPLES OF EVERYDAY METAPHOR:

1) The conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. The two conceptual domains are “life” and “a journey.” This mapping makes sense to us because in our culture “life” is often thought of as having similarities with “a journey.”

1. “I’m not sure which path to take: should I major in English or Music?”

2. “Let your conscience be your guide.”

3. “When I look back over my life, I see the routes I chose, and now I understand why I chose them.”

4. “My bad grades were a roadblock when I was applying for financial aid.”

5. “I finally made it to graduation!”

These sentences make sense to us because we know the correspondences between life and a journey. How are the statements below connected to the examples above?

• The person leading a life is a traveler.
• His purposes or goals are destinations.
• The means for achieving purposes are routes or paths.
• Difficulties in life are impediments to travel.
• Counselors are guides.
• Things you gauge your progress by are landmarks.
• Choices in life are crossroads. (Lakoff & Turner, p. 3)

2) The conceptual metaphors DEATH IS DEPARTURE and DEATH IS SLEEP.

1. “He passed away.”

2. “He’s left us.”

3. “Rest in peace.”

4. “She is forever sleeping.”

What correspondences can you think of between death and departure, or between death and sleep?

What poets do:

{NOTE: for our purposes, “poets” are not only those who write poems. They also write plays, novels, short stories, essays, and film scripts. They write poetically. These are only some examples of what poets do – there are more and they grow more complicated as you investigate further.}

EXAMPLES OF POETIC METAPHOR:

1)Poets extend a metaphor to include new elements. For example, Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet is a very broody guy, often wondering what the point of life is, and if he should just “depart,” to use a metaphor mentioned above. He asks:

63
64
65 / … To die, to sleep –
To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?(3.1.63 – 65)

Not only is death mapped onto sleep, but now Shakespeare adds the possibility of “dreams.” We know that dreams come after sleep, so now the metaphoric interpretation of “dreams” is wide open.

What happens after death? What is Hamlet so bothered by, or afraid of?

2)Poets use their imagination. For example, in the first four lines of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death,” we see the following:

1
2
3
4 / Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just ourselves –
And Immortality. (1-4)

Dickinson takes the metaphor DEATH AS DEPARTURE and gets creative with it: Death could be seen as the driver of a coach, or carriage (this is called personification). The coach is the vehicle in which the narrator is taken to death: it’s how the narrator “departs” from life.

3) Poets join two or more conventional metaphors in surprising ways to form composite metaphors. For example, in #1 above, Shakespeare combines two versions of death: DEATH AS SLEEP and DEATH AS DEPARTURE, and then compounds that by adding the idea of dreaming after “sleep.” Now there is some new, undefined, metaphor for “dream,” (whatever happens after we die) and Shakespeare allows the reader to use her own imagination to finish mapping the correspondence. In #2, Dickinson has combined DEATH AS DEPARTURE with the personification of both Death and Immortality. These are both examples of composite metaphors.

4)Poets combine metaphors so that the text in its entirety might have some larger purpose. Lakoff & Turner write that “The poem as a whole can be read as giving larger and more general instructions” (146). When we search for this “larger purpose” we are looking for the global metaphor. Sometimes there are hints to this overall reading, such as the title of a text or the repetition of certain elements. The global metaphor is not necessarily set in stone, and can vary from interpreter to interpreter. You can choose any overall meaning or purpose of the poem, as long as it makes sense to us, and as long as you can justify it with evidence from the text and clear analysis.

Personification

Special cases of metaphor Part One:

Personification:This is when a writer attributes “human” qualities to something that is not human, and this helps us to better understand certain experiences or entities.

EXAMPLES OF EVERYDAY PERSONIFICATION:

1. “My car didn’t want to go this morning.”

2. “The dryer ate another one of my socks.”

3. “I fought the rain the whole way home.”

EXAMPLE OF POETIC PERSONIFICATION:

In John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” the narrator speaks directly to Death:

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4
5
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7
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9
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14 / Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Notice that:

• The narrator uses second-person pronouns to refer to death (“thou,” “thee,” etc.). This “humanizes” death. To further this point, these pronouns are repeated once per line in the first seven lines.

• With one exception, “Death” is capitalized throughout the poem, and this makes it seem like a proper noun, a name, and therefore “human”- like and powerful. At the beginning of the last line of the sonnet, however, Donne takes away this privilege by using a lower-case “d” – telling Death that ultimately it will lose us to eternal life, and will therefore be demoted in power.

• The narrator calls death a “slave” in line 9, and this metaphor lends itself to the idea that death is human.

• Also, notice how Donne has utilized the DEATH AS SLEEP metaphor in this sonnet.

(More on personification in the Lakoff readings under the title “Concepts We Live By, and more”).

Iconicity

Special cases of metaphor Part Two:

Iconicity: Although Iconicity in language can occur in several ways, we will examine the kind of “iconic mapping” that takes place when the form and the meaning of a text are related. This means that the manner in which the words of a text are placed on a page (its “form”) is significant and lends itself to the poetic interpretation (its “meaning”) of the text. Lakoff and Turner tell us that “when such a mapping exists between the structure of a sentence [or even a whole poem] and the structure of the meaning of the image that the sentence [or poem] conveys, the mapping is called ‘iconic’” (156). This type of examination is useful as iconicity can add even deeper layers of meaning to a text.

EXAMPLE OF ICONICITY IN LANGUAGE

If we consider a few stanzas from Gloria Anzaldúa’s “The Homeland, Aztlán/El Otro Mexico,” we can see an example of iconicity in language:

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3
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14
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16 / Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into the sand
I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean
where the two overlap
a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent clash.
Across the border in Mexico
stark silhouette of houses gutted by waves,
cliffs crumbling into the sea,
silver waves marbled with spume
gashing a hole under the border fence.

Miro el mar atacar

la cerca en BorderFieldPark
con sus buchones de agua,
an Easter Sunday resurrection
of the brown blood in my veins.

Notice that:

• In the first line of this example, Anzaldúa writes that the wind is “tugging at her sleeve.” How might the form of lines 7-14 represent this line metaphorically?

• In the first stanza, she writes of the movement of the sea as it reaches the land. Again, how might the form of the following lines evoke this movement, or this “coming together”?

• Stepping outside the language of the poem, how might the structure of lines 7-14 represent the internal or external struggles of a Borderland inhabitant? Can we map the movement of the lines of the poem onto the daily life of a person who is of two cultures?

• How might the movement of these lines be representative of a person who speaks both languages that are used in the poem? When in the poem does the poet move from one language to another, or from one style (normal or italicized) to another? How might these styles be connected with one of the languages?

(More on iconicity in the Lakoff & Turner reading under the title “The Metaphoric Structure of a Single Poem”).

Works Cited in Metaphor 101

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “The homeland, Aztlán/El Otro Mexico.” Writing As Revision. Eds. Beth Alvarado, Barbara Cully and Michael Robinson. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2003. 466 – 476.

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death.” Poetry Exhibits. The Academy of American Poets. 5 June, 2004. <

Donne, John. “Holy Sonnet 10.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Ed M.H. Abrams. 6th Ed. New York: Norton, 1996. 611.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G.

Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. 1135 – 1197.