The Use of Metaphors
SanTianna Simmons ENG 1102 25 April 2013 A metaphor is where you show how two unrelated things are similar. For example by saying “Love is a roller-coaster. ” A key aspect of a metaphor is use a specific transference of a word into another context. The human mind creates comparisons between different things. The best writers use metaphors. Like poetry, a metaphor will express a thousand different meanings all at once, allowing the writer to convey much more content than they could do otherwise.
More than playing simple word games, the use of metaphors in your writing can elevate your stories to a place next to the greatest authors in the world. There are many kinds of metaphors: Allegory, catechesis, parables, extended metaphors, etc. An extended metaphor establishes a subject and then extends it further, as in this quote from Shakespeare “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. Brian Doyle, Author of “Joyas Valdoras”, uses the hummingbird metaphor to support his story. The story starts off by grabbing the reader’s attention with a fact. The fact is very interesting. Unless you are someone that studies animals, you would have no idea that a hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil, or that it beats ten times per second. After I read the first sentence, I was instantly interested to see what more the author had to say. He got the name, Joyas Valdoras, from a reference by early Spanish settlers. It means flying jewels.
They called these creatures flying jewels because they had never seen anything like them before. They would fly around quickly all day, reproducing and collecting nectar. Doyle then goes on to add more facts about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. Hummingbirds can fly up to 500 miles without stopping to rest, however they can get burned out. Whenever humming birds get burned out, it can become fatal. Although Doyle’s allusion to hummingbirds was interesting, I don’t think he meant for his story to simply be a story about humming birds.
He also goes on to talk about the blue whale, an animal having the largest heart in the world. He gives us interesting facts about that animal also, but this still does not justify why he was even writing the story, for if he had wanted his readers to be informed only about animals, he’d have put these facts in a science book instead. I think Doyle was relating the animal’s hearts with that of human hearts. He said sometimes humming birds get burned out without even knowing what they’re doing is dangerous. Humans also do the same thing.
Today’s world is very fast paced. Sometimes we don’t have time to rest or do anything of that nature. We do it, without knowing how unhealthy to the body and spirit that is. He also alludes that the heart is a very strong thing. Not just our physical heart, but our emotional and spiritual heart as well. So much can happen to someone’s heart. It can go through the most joy, excitement, hurt and pain and still beat at the end of the day. I think the way Doyle transitions form talking about hummingbirds and whales to something so emotional was very effective.
He makes it easy for us to relate to his story because he keeps us so involved. I felt as if he was ready the story to me instead of the other way around. Sian-Pierre Regis stated “As should be obvious by now, Doyle is doing far more than describing the hearts of various animals. In explaining about the hearts of animals, he has subtly been drawing us into this reality: “We all churn inside. ” In this creation there is unimaginable beauty (“flying jewels”) and there is excruciating pain (“a brilliant music stilled”).
And so finally, we are led to his masterful ending and the real point of this whole piece. If you’ve read this far, I encourage you to take a minute and quiet your heart. Let yourself feel these words. It may hurt, but it will almost certainly heal as well. In giving an overview of the hearts of creatures, Doyle ends with this: “So much held in a heart in lifetime. So much held in a heart in day, and hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end–not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend.
We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.
You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. ”” The article “A Metaphorical Analysis of Martin Luther King Jr. s ‘I Have a Dream Speech,’” by Joe Ciesinski, to me is an aide to help understand the metaphors Dr. Martin Luther King used within his famous speech ‘I have a Dream. ’ Ciesinski cited other’s opinions about the speech which also was another great source of helping understand the speech. Within the article, the question “What does ‘I Have a Dream’ mean to me” was asked. To me, when someone asks me what does ‘I Have a Dream’ mean to me, I would say that it makes me feel as if the color of my skin or my sex should never be a factor of why I can’t do anything that I want to do. Anybody should be capable of saying the same.
Ciesinski believes that ‘I Have a Dream’ would not only speak about problems in America, but that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr would call upon all citizens of the United States to enact change and correct the injustices that would occur throughout our nation. “Martin Luther King Jr. contrasts light and dark metaphors when he states, “this momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. ”” (Ciesinski) The previous quote to me sums up the entire ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
It focuses on the struggles of colored people and how the nation needs to take the time out to notice that these hate crimes need to come to an end. Overall, I think Ciesinski’s metaphorical analysis is a great help to distinguish the true meaning and break down of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s speech. I also believe that he used good sources to help apprehend the famous speech. “It is a stark metaphor, an accusation articulated in bluntly economic terms. The Declaration of Independence implied, and later the Emancipation Proclamation promised, meaningful freedom to African Americans. But the promise was never fulfilled. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds,” King said. This part of the speech has been mostly forgotten, swamped in collective memory by the soaring rhetoric of King’s peroration. When initial renderings for the new Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial were first unveiled, they included a prominent place for the promissory-note metaphor, but as the project went forward the quotation was deemed “too confrontational” and dropped from the final design. What is best remembered from the Dream speech is, in fact, not original to it.
The thrilling incantation, the cries of “let freedom ring,” the litany of place names (the snowcapped Rockies, the molehills of Mississippi), the lines borrowed from the biblical books of Amos and Isaiah, the quotations from spirituals and patriotic songs — none of this material was original to the speech King gave on the Mall. Most of it was recycled, an impromptu decision by King to reuse some of the best applause lines he had tested in Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama and, only weeks earlier, in Detroit. ” Stated by Philip Kennicott. Short talks by Anne Carson was an article full of miniature lectures with a different meaning for each one.
Some of the short articles were confusing but the others caught my attention. An article in Short Talks that was easily understood was ON WALKING BACKWARDS. ON WALKING BACKWARDS was about how as a child Carson states “My mother would forbid us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. ” Carson goes on to say that she had no understanding where that specific superstition came from. Later to break the quote down, the dead doesn’t walk backwards but they do walk behind us with no lungs to breath or cannot call but would love for us to turn around.
Superstitions are to be used and known all across the world. According to Keisha Stephen-Gittens from Outlish Magazine quotes “Since I was a child, I used to hear my grandmother telling my mother that if she came home after midnight, she better had walk in the house backwards so that spirits don’t follow her inside. That’s funny, because many of us feters would have some ‘back walking’ to do. So, I was surprised to find that almost 60% of the persons I randomly surveyed still do this today. I followed this superstition religiously until I moved out on my own, and then, ironically, I would just ook left, right and around before I entered my apartment. You’d think I would be really afraid – and in a way yes, but I was looking for bandits, not spirits. However, the way things goin’ these days, is bess we look for both yes! We’ve also been told to close doors facing the outside so that spirits don’t follow you inside. There are other superstitions about spirits and death and our older folks would tell these with a passion and intensity that would send you to bed quivering, wanting a pillow to hug up and sleeping with one eye open.
If you’re alone in the house and you hear someone call your name, would you answer? I won’t. The ole folks used to say do not answer, ’cause it could be a spirit calling. I think this is a given. I’ve watched too many horror movies to know what the outcome of THAT could be. ” Jon Eben Field states “The female body is a powerful signifier in these poems. ” Short Talks invokes the last thirty years of Camille Claudel’s life in an asylum (Claudel was a French sculptor who worked from 1884 to 1898 as an assistant to Auguste Rodin).
After noting that Claudel broke all the sculpting stone given to her, Carson writes, “Night was when her hands grew, huger and huger until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees. ” Claudel’s hands are both her own and not her own; they have grown through disuse and misuse. But the absence is discovered in the formless broken stones that are buried with these hands, now so gargantuan. In “Short Talk On Rectification,” Carson depicts the infamous relationship between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer: “Kafka liked to have his watch an hour and a half fast. Felice kept setting it right.
Nonetheless for five years they almost married. ” Ultimately, it is the body of Felice that overwhelms Kafka, for as Carson writes, “When advised not to speak by the doctors in the sanatorium, he left glass sentences all over the floor. Felice, says one of them, had too much nakedness left in her. ” This signals the second most pervasive theme of these poems, the devastating plenitude of too much. ” Eula Biss’ The Pain Scale is about how no matter how much something is painful, no pain lasts forever. Throughout the article Biss gives examples of pain as she goes from 0 to 10 on a pain scale.
She gives examples like if you are at a zero, you feel no pain therefore you could be fine. If you are at a 1, you could take some aspirin and be fine the next day. If you are at an 8 you might need some examining. If you are at a nine then, you are suffering and it gets even worse at a level ten which is unbearable. The Pain Scale, Eula Biss claims that no pain lasts forever. Biss goes on to say that when you experience the pain regardless of how bad the pain is, once the pain goes away; you can’t feel the pain anymore. I got a feeling that the author is indifferent to pain and does not know how to feel or describe it.
I felt that the author’s mind is being guided by what her father use to tell her. She does not know how to describe what she is feeling or think for herself. The author feels as if excruciating pain does not exist. She sees zero as a number that does not do the same thing as the other numbers and she uses biblical illusions concerning Jesus.. The author goes back and forth from her pain theory and analysis, to her current pain situation. She is obviously feeling some pain but she thinks the face chart does not help her know what level she is that. She lies to the doctor to not seem foolish but really she does have great pain.
The author thinks that if she admits to her great physical pain, she will seem pathetic and exaggerated. The author has apparent physical pain but also mental trauma from her father the physician. Her psychological pain I think is greater than her physical one in a couple of ways. I agree with Biss on this issue. Overall, I believe that no pain lasts forever. If a person were to ask another how something felt, they could never sit there and visualize the full effect of that pain right then and there unless you go through the same pain again at the time being.
Our Secret by Susan Griffin is a hybrid of memoir, history, and journalism, and is built with these discrete strands: the Holocaust; women affected by World War II directly or indirectly in their treatment by husbands and fathers; the harsh, repressive boyhood of Heinrich Himmler, who grew up to command Nazi rocketry and became the key architect of Jewish genocide; the testimony of a man scarred by war; and Griffin’s own desperately unhappy family life and harsh, repressed girlhood.
In between these chunks are short italic passages of just a few sentences on cell biology—for instance, how the shell around the nucleus of the cell allows only some substances to pass through—and on the development of guided missiles in Germany and, later, by many of the same scientists, in the United States, where nuclear warheads were added and the ICBM created. Researching her book in Paris, Griffin meets a woman, Helene, who survived one of Himmler’s death camps.
She’d been turned in by another Jew and tracked down using a net of information—a system tracing back to Himmler’s boyhood diaries—collected on cards and sent to the Gestapo for duplication and filing, the work of countless men and women. In the article “Translating Translation: Finding the Beginning,” Alberto Alvaro Rios claims that the act is the translation by presenting translation as a metaphor and how cultures are different. Rios goes on to say that how something is said, the language can be figured.
In Rios’ article, he had multiple examples of how cultures are different. Some of the examples that he expressed where how a man was put in jail, forgotten about and never said anything, how his house painting went wrong when he was young, and how Rios had a misinterpretation about fighting. I agree with Rios on this issue when he stated that learning languages can be similar to looking through a set of binoculars. Overall, I believe that it is true that the simplest word can have many definitions and interpretations.
For example: when Rios moved into his new home when he was younger. His mother wanted the wall to be yellow but the Mexican thought she wanted it to be lime green due to the fact that said “limon. ” Another example was when the boy asked how many fights has he had. The boy meant physical fighting but Rios meant the fight he has had learning a new language. I believe that the metaphors were very effective because they helped understand the main key points Rios was trying to make.
Alberto Rios states “Linguists, by using electrodes on the vocal cords, have been able to demonstrate that English has tenser vowels than, for example, Spanish. The body itself speaks a language differently, so that moving from one language to another is more than translating words. It’s getting the body ready as well. It’s getting the heart ready along with the mind. I’ve been intrigued by this information. It addresses the physicality of language in a way that perhaps surprises us.
In this sense, we forget that words aren’t simply what they mean – they are also physical acts. I often talk about the duality of language using the metaphor of binoculars, how by using two lenses one might see something better, closer, with more detail. The apparatus, the binoculars, are of course physically clumsy – as is the learning of two languages, and all the signage and so on that this entails – they’re clumsy, but once put to the eyes a new world in that moment opens up to us.
And it’s not a new world at all – it’s the same world, but simply better seen, and therefore better understood. ” Overall, metaphors will elevate your writing, taking something plain and transforming it into something beautiful. Poetry is full of metaphors. If you need to, use one of your rewriting cycles just to add metaphors to your story. Imagine how greater your story will be with the use of metaphors. Metaphors will free up your imagination, which will take your story in directions you may not have planned on. Enjoy the surprises that metaphors will bring to you!
