ENG140Y1/Unit 3
Unit 3 · Literature for our Time

Poetry II: Figurative Language

Saying one thing in terms of another. A metaphor is an argument compressed into a phrase, and analysing it means unpacking the claim — what is being compared, what carries across, and what the comparison quietly refuses.

By the end you can
  • Separate the two halves of a metaphor and say what transfers.
  • Distinguish image, metaphor, simile, symbol and conceit.
  • Identify tone and how it is produced.
  • Track an extended metaphor and say when it breaks.
Why it matters & where it comes from
Why it exists

Some things have no direct language — grief, time, love. Metaphor borrows the vocabulary of something concrete and lends it, and the choice of what to borrow from is itself a claim about the subject.

In the real world

Political language runs on metaphor: a debate framed as a war licenses different moves from one framed as a conversation. Noticing the frame is the same skill as reading a poem.

Story & open questions

Lakoff and Johnson argued in 1980 that metaphor is not ornament but the basic machinery of thought — that we understand argument as war and time as money without noticing. If so, close reading a metaphor is examining how someone is being asked to think.

The anatomy of a metaphor

Definition

Every metaphor has two parts:

The tenor — what is actually being talked about.
The vehicle — what it is being described as.

In "the city was a furnace", the city is the tenor and the furnace the vehicle. Analysis means asking what transfers between them.

Rule Ask three questions
What carries across? Heat, certainly. Perhaps also enclosure, industry, something being consumed.
What does not carry across? A furnace is deliberately built and controlled. If the poem wants the city to feel accidental, the metaphor works against it.
What would a different vehicle have said? "The city was an oven" is domestic; "the city was a kiln" implies something being hardened. The choice is the argument.

That third question is the most useful and the least used. Comparing the metaphor to the one that was not chosen shows what this one is doing.

Example Unpacking one

An invented line: "Her answer was a door."

Tenor: the answer. Vehicle: a door.
Carries across: something that can be shut, that stands between two people, that has a side you are on.
Ambiguity worth using: a door can also open. The metaphor does not settle which, so the line holds refusal and possibility at once — and if the poem never resolves it, that is the point rather than a fault.
Compare "her answer was a wall", which would settle it. The poet chose the ambiguous vehicle.

The related terms

Definition
Image: language appealing to the senses. Not necessarily figurative — "the cold plate" is an image and no comparison.
Simile: comparison marked with like or as. The marking keeps the two things separate.
Metaphor: comparison stated as identity. More forceful, because it collapses the distance.
Symbol: something that stands for a larger idea while remaining itself. A river in a poem is still a river and may also be time.
Conceit: a metaphor sustained and elaborated at length, often to the point of strain. The strain is usually deliberate.
Personification: giving human qualities to something not human.
Example Simile versus metaphor
"He moved like a shadow" keeps him a person who resembles a shadow. The like preserves the gap.
"He was a shadow" closes the gap. It is a stronger claim and slightly stranger — the reader has to work out in what sense it could be true.
Neither is better. But if a poem uses similes throughout and then one metaphor, that shift is worth an essay paragraph.
Symbol is not a code

A symbol does not have a fixed meaning waiting to be decoded. A rose is not "love"; it is a rose that a particular text puts to a particular use, and the use may be conventional, ironic or entirely local. Argue from what this text does with it.

Extended metaphor

Rule Track it, and watch for the break

When a metaphor runs across a whole poem, follow how it develops. The most productive moment is usually where it stops working — where the vehicle can no longer carry what the tenor needs.

Example A metaphor breaking down

Suppose a poem describes a friendship as a house through several stanzas — foundations, rooms, weather outside — and then the last stanza mentions the tenant leaving.

Up to that point the metaphor holds: a house is shared, built, maintained.
"Tenant" changes the terms. A tenant does not own the house, was always temporary, and pays for the privilege. The metaphor has quietly shifted from partnership to arrangement.
That shift is the essay. The poem has said something about the friendship it never states directly, purely by moving within the vehicle.

Tone

Definition

Tone is the attitude the text takes to its subject and its reader. It is produced, not asserted, and the production is what you analyse.

Rule Where tone comes from
Diction. Formal or colloquial, Latinate or plain. "Deceased" and "dead" carry different attitudes.
Syntax. Long subordinated sentences feel considered; short ones feel blunt or shocked.
Distance. How close the speaker stands to the subject, and whether that changes.
Irony. A gap between what is said and what the text lets you understand.
Example Tone shifting

A poem opens with long, clause-heavy sentences and ends with three words on their own line.

The syntax has contracted. Whatever elaboration was doing — delaying, controlling, explaining — has stopped working.
You do not need to name the emotion. Describing the mechanism is stronger than labelling the feeling, and safer, since the label is arguable and the mechanism is on the page.
Do not confuse speaker with poet

The speaker is a voice constructed by the poem and may be nothing like the author. Write "the speaker", not "the poet", unless the text gives you reason to identify them. It is a small habit and markers notice it.

Common pitfalls

• Identifying a metaphor without unpacking what transfers.
• Treating symbols as having fixed universal meanings.
• Calling everything imagery. Imagery is sensory; not all figurative language is.
• Naming a tone without showing what produces it.
• Conflating speaker and poet.

Practice

Work each fully before opening the answer. These use invented lines so the method is visible without depending on a set text.

Practice 1 · Tenor and vehicle

Identify both in "grief is a country".

Answer
Tenor: grief. Vehicle: a country. Transferring: somewhere you can be inside, that has borders, that others have not visited.
Practice 2 · What does not transfer

For the same metaphor, what does not carry across?

Answer
Countries have governments, populations, histories. If the poem wants grief to feel solitary, "country" works against it — unless the poem exploits exactly that, making the speaker the only inhabitant of somewhere built for millions.
Practice 3 · The alternative

How would "grief is a room" differ?

Answer
Smaller, enclosed, domestic, exitable. "Country" makes grief vast and hard to leave; "room" makes it confining but bounded. Comparing the two shows what the chosen vehicle is claiming.
Practice 4 · Term check

Is "the sea was like glass" a metaphor?

Answer
No — a simile, marked by "like". The comparison is kept explicit and the two things stay separate.
Practice 5 · Symbol

A poem mentions a locked gate three times. Is it a symbol?

Answer
Possibly. Repetition is evidence that it is doing more than furnishing the scene. But you must argue what it stands for in this poem, from its contexts — not from what gates conventionally mean.
Practice 6 · Tone from syntax

What does a poem of one-word lines suggest about tone?

Solution
Each word gets equal weight and maximum pause, so nothing is subordinated to anything. That might read as deliberation, or as an inability to build a sentence. Which one depends on the words; the mechanism is the same either way and is what you write about.
Practice 7 · Irony

How do you show a passage is ironic rather than sincere?

Answer
Find the gap: something elsewhere in the text that contradicts the surface claim. Irony is only demonstrable when the text supplies the other half; asserting it without that is guesswork.
Practice 8 · Speaker

Why write "the speaker" rather than "the poet"?

Answer
The speaker is a voice the poem constructs and may be a persona, unreliable, or nothing like the author. Collapsing the two turns a textual claim into a biographical one you cannot support.

Expanded topic checklist

Course coverage. This unit is part of the complete ENG140Y1 topic map. It should cover the following before you move on:

  • Metaphor anatomy. Tenor, vehicle, what transfers and what does not.
  • The vocabulary. Image, simile, metaphor, symbol, conceit, personification.
  • Extended metaphor. Tracking development and reading the breakdown.
  • Tone. Its sources in diction, syntax, distance and irony.
Textbook/source alignment

The calendar names poetry as one of three genres. Check Quercus for the set poems and for the glossary of terms the course expects you to use.

Core idea map

Figurative language makes a claim by comparison. Unpack the comparison, ask what it excludes, and compare it to the one not chosen. Units 4 and 5 apply the same attention to prose.

Study routine. For every metaphor you write about, spend one sentence on what does not transfer. It is the fastest route from description to argument.

Deep practice extensions

Use these after the main practice set. They test whether the distinctions have actually landed.

Extension 1 · The two halves

Name the parts of a metaphor.

Guide
Tenor, the actual subject, and vehicle, what it is described as.
Extension 2 · The best question

What is the most productive question to ask of a metaphor?

Guide
What a different vehicle would have said. The contrast reveals what this one claims.
Extension 3 · Symbols

Do symbols have fixed meanings?

Guide
No. Argue from what the particular text does with the object, not from convention.
Extension 4 · Tone

How is tone demonstrated rather than asserted?

Guide
By pointing at the diction and syntax that produce it. Name the mechanism, not just the feeling.
← Unit 02Poetry I: form & sound Unit 04 →Prose I: narration & point of view