Metaphor and Metonymy a conversation: Your friend comes in out of the rain

Metaphor and Metonymy

A conversation: Your friend comes in out of the rain.

• “Well, you’re a pretty sight! Got slightly wet, didn’t you?”
• “Wet, I’m drowned! It’s raining cats and dogs, and my raincoat’s like a sieve!”
• What’s literally true in these statements? What’s “figurative.”

Figure of Speech

• Any way of saying something other than in the ordinary way.
• Figurative language -- Language that cannot be taken literally.
• Give me a list of clichés that employ figurative language.

Metaphor and Simile

• Both compare things that are essentially unlike.
• Metaphor implies the comparison
• (My love is a rose.)
• Simile expresses the comparison by the use of some word or phrase-- like, as, than, similar to, resembles, seems.
• (My love is like a rose.)

The Guitarist Tunes Up Francis Cornford

• With what attentive courtesy he bent
• Over his instrument;
• Not as a lordly conqueror who could
• Command both wire and wood,
• But as a man with a loved woman might,
• Inquiring with delight
• What slight essential things she had to say
• Before they started, he and she, to play.

Metaphors Sylvia Plath

• I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
• An elephant, a ponderous house,
• A melon strolling on two tendrils,
• O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
• This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
• Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
• I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
• I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
• Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Metonomy and Synecdoche

• Metonomy establishes a connection based on association.
• “The Pen is mightier than the sword.”
• “In the sweat of thy face, thou shalt eat bread.”
• Synecdoche -- A part standing for a whole.
• “The crown lead the attack.”
• “The hands finished the haying.”

Metonomy/Synecdoche

• A Hummingbird -- Dickenson
• A route of evanescence
• With a revolving wheel;
• A resonance of emerald,
• A rush of cochineal;
• And every blossom on the bush
• Adjusts its tumbled head, --
• The mail from Tunis, probably,
• An easy morning’s ride.

• What type of figurative langauge is he using here?
• What three metaphors does he develop?

• Huswifery, Taylor, 643

Valediction, Forbidding Mourning, Donne, 623

• Vocabulary: valediction, mourning, profanation, laity, trepidation, innocent, sublunary, elemented?
• Find 3 similies and one metaphor in the poem?
• Is the speaker dying? Or merely going on a journey?
• How would you describe the language in this poem?

Prufrock, Eliot, p. 729

• Find two similies
• Find an extended metaphor
• Find an example of synecdoche