your favourite literary metaphors

[cacian]

I enjoy metaphors although I always get it confused with metamorphosis haha
why not post your favourite/s here reading them always brings a smile.
could you also say why you like it if possible :)


'the lady's not for turning' if that could be counted as one. I like this one because it feels it ought to have been Shakespearian and it has a visual impact.

my next one is by Freud:
''sometime a cigar is just a cigar''

I chose this one because of the simplicity of it and since a cigar is visual then there is that palpability about it that l like. It is almost like reaching out and feeling the sentence in your hands.
this metaphor also has the potential to expend :
''and sometimes just sometimes it is not what it ought to have been......''
or something like this haha ;)

[NowInBuda]

I like this thread. One of all-time favorites (which, because I encountered it for the first time only a few weeks ago either says a great deal or nothing at all...), is this sequence from the first chapter of Walden:

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."

It is astounding to me how one thought could be so masterfully-crafted, and so obscure at the same time...In the context of the book, I think, Thoreau is talking about his Muse, his motivation, his intangible dreams, or - most likely - all of these things bound into one. I have an affinity for animal metaphors, especially in the case of Walden where plants and creatures eventually come to completely dominate the physical and abstract landscape of Thoreau's thoughts. In these opening pages though, when I was still unfamiliar of the direction the book would take, I was stunned by how the man could take something so necessarily intangible and create a direct link between his own impulse, and the impulses of others: the peers, the readers, the "travelers."

It's touching, its moving, its evocative, and at the same time means virtually nothing, unless one is willing to impart their own deep-seated dreams onto those simple, fleeting creatures.


It is metaphors like this that remind me why poetic language and metaphor are vital for stirring thoughts and ideas that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

I could go on...

Thanks for this thread, by the way, which let me explore this quote a little bit.

[cacian]

interesting post NowInBuda. I however always find it complex how anyone can associate themselves that closely with animals creatures for they are nothing to do with us. we are ultimately different from them.
I never crosses my mind to do so. I always link myself with other like me because but it is from within that the answers lie.

[Oedipus]

Not a metaphor, but related in a way: it was when reading a Sturgeon short story, "One Foot and the Grave", that I noticed two turns of phrase that gave me a habit I have. At one point in the story, in quick succession, come the two lines - "Everybody loves somebody - else" and "She had other assets and I was quite taken with both of them" - that convinced me that if I never wrote a story in my life (again), I shoud still spend time just thinking of marvellous wit-dripped things like these - I loved them so much. And that's my story, which I felt like writing and which you already wish would just end. As for a metaphor - "he was the receiving terminal for endless joys and pleasures of the past that the world had dropped along the way" is from an Ellison story about a never-ageing five year old who can get new episodes of cancelled shows etc and is eventully killed by his parents.

[cacian]

"he was the receiving terminal for endless joys and pleasures of the past that the world had dropped along the way" is from an Ellison story about a never-ageing five year old who can get new episodes of cancelled shows etc and is eventully killed by his parents.
that would have freaked me out if had came about it at a younger age. I would image any five year old would find this story disturbing. did it not affect you in any way?
oh and there is a similarity there somewhere with Dorian Grey.

[Oedipus]

It did affect me - though mostly it's actually a very sentimental look at nostalgia and the age before education stifles the individual, the whole parent thing being only subtly implied at the end. It's a great story; one of his best.

[cacian]

It did affect me - though mostly it's actually a very sentimental look at nostalgia and the age before education stifles the individual, the whole parent thing being only subtly implied at the end. It's a great story; one of his best.

I so agree with you about education. it is a right mess up for children as far as I am concerned. if it was down to me I will have banned.