# Writing > General Writing >  I Need Help

## Maljackson

I just need abit of guidance.

I have been given this question and i dont know what text to use so i can answer it

can anyone suggest any ideas.

I want a book that itsnt too long.

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor (Wallace Stevens). In the light of this claim, consider the significance of metaphor in a text of your choice.

Can anyone help me?

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## Sitaram

try to get hold of Wallace Stevens essays "The Necessary Angel"

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## Sitaram

do you know how to use google.com ... i hope you do.... search on "wallace stevens" and "necessary angel" and even "necessary angel" sitaram .... my name.... and you will see things i wrote about wallace stevens... no time left .. must run

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## Maljackson

How will this help me sitaram?

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## Sitaram

God helps those who help themselves.......

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## Maljackson

thanks for your help sitaram

I just dont know how to tackle this question....

How do you think i should approach this question?

thanks for your help

god bless you

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## Sitaram

get into google.com ... start searching, like i told you, on search strings that make sense for your problem.... READ carefully those links which seem pertinent.... ask other for help.... 

at least its a start....

there is SO MUCH on the internet already... answers to every conceivable question... if only we know how to use search engines... i will try to help later.. tonight

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## Maljackson

sitaram

i need to consider the significance of the metaphor. I cant search for that can i?

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## Sitaram

quick fix.... no time...

read page 19 at my site

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page019.htm

pick one of those passages..... 

also look at page 23 at my site.....

there should be some things there to give you ideas... gotta run

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## Sitaram

When is your DEADLINE.... today? tomorrow,.... or next week?

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## Sitaram

I HAVE A WHOLE page at my site entitled "The Mathematics of Metaphor".... its gotta help, somehow

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## Sitaram

search on stuff like "the function of metaphor in literature" .... enclose the entire sentence in quotes in google..... you are bound to get some good material..... search on LITERARY METAPHOR DEFINITION no quotes....

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## Maljackson

the page is quite short. my deadline is for friday. my essay should be 1500 words long. I need references too.

shall i refer to the text you suggested?

god bless you.

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## Sitaram

we have some time then.... i will post some today... and then tonight....

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## Sitaram

for now, search for EVERYTHING you can find on the definition of metaphor.... so you have a firm foundation on all the nuances of meaning..;.... I posted a lot in the thread on that author of Slaughterhouse Five.... vonnegut... kurt...... look at that post.... Calling Kurt VOnnegut fans... the stuff on metonymy (i cant spell right now..) gotta

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## Maljackson

Im only in my first year and i dont feel as comftable as you do on the issues regarding the importance of metaphor but if you think it can help me then thanks.

How do you think i should start my essay?

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## Sitaram

I shall have to give some thought.... but meanwhile... try to do the reading and exercises with google that I suggested... your short range goal is the paper on Friday, but you LONG range goal is to learn how to think about these matters, and research, and compose your thoughts.... 

It is ok to be first year, and uncertain.... we have all been there in our lives...

but at least read the links i mentioned... and i shall re-read them myself

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## Sitaram

Here are a few important things (my time is limited until tonight):

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page019.htm

Life appears to us as an endless collection of unstructured images and events. We pick and choose and impose some narrative structure, theme and plot upon this cacophonous, kaleidoscopic confusion. 

The self is a work in progress. As we construct our identity, we come to know our self through an emerging self awareness. Each of us is an author with respect to our autobiographical narrative sense of self. We define our selves. 

http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page023.htm

Frost states that (paraphrased): 

Education by poetry is education by metaphor 

I have wanted  to make metaphor the whole of thinking 

Best and most fruitful was Pythagoras comparison of the universe with number. 

Everything is an event 

Bohr said that the individual atom has its freedom but the mass is under necessity. 

We have been lead into our present moral position by metaphor by using all the good words which virtue has invented to maintain virtue such as honesty, frankness, sincerity, joy, health. 

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it! It is a very living thing. It is life itself. 

The greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make a final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed. 

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

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## Maljackson

I will do so.

As i was saying. I do need a bibliography and a text to refer to .

Are u suggesting that i use " A necessary angel"?

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## Maljackson

thanks for this.

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## Sitaram

"A Necessary Angel" is a collection of essays by Wallace Stevens (straight from the horses mouth) about the use of imagination (which he calls "the necessary angel") and metaphor in art and literature, to more or less reconstruct reality,., or take us out of it... do some google.com searches on : stevens "the necessary angel"

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## Sitaram

read this http://www.unibuc.ro/eBooks/lls/Anca...ENS/PATRU3.HTM

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## Sitaram

"Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblances", as the metaphor of the theorist carries on. It is the poet's metaphor that ironically and most refreshingly turns the former upside down (or is this rather a "nicety", a subtler manner to reinforce it?): 

"It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."("The Well Dressed Man with a Beard") 

"The brilliance of earth is the brilliance of every paradise" 

and that:"poetry is a part of the structure of reality", 

and, moreover, that "poetry and metaphor are one", may enable one to deduce that poetry (therefore, metaphor) must ultimately share the heavenly brilliance (or purity) as their august source of life. 

"I think that his [i.e. the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs [i.e. the readers'] and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives." 

"The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew." 

The trouble is that the poet's mind is always younger than the minds of his would-be contemporary readers, as it happens in any true illustration of the Faustian myth. Hence, it is he who teaches them what to expect (and later require) from the modern poetry he is the very maker of. Thus, the actual performance of the poet's role turns into a live metaphor, exhausting all the infinite possibilities of the mind it is being produced by. All that matters is that the live metaphor keep on living for the readers' sake. 


The poem of the mind in the act of finding 

What will suffice" 

suggests not only the requirement that modern poetry be intellectual, abstract, but also that the way the mind functions is in itself a poem. "The act of finding/What will suffice" is the pattern of any mental project of an ingenious solution to the obscure metaphor of a live problem.

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## Maljackson

matters are starting to make sense and i can only thank you for that sitaram but i still dont know how i should structure my essay because 1500 words isnt that much and i dont want to waffle.

Plus i need references to back my opinions so its quite hard to fit it all in.

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## Sitaram

for today.... concentrate on searching, reading, cutting and pasting stuff together,.... understanding, becoming comfortable with what metaphor means for people like Stevens and Frost and Milan Kundera and Kurt Vonnegut..... 

Worry about the form, footnotes, bibliograpy later..... maybe for a starter..... do this... ask WHAT IS METAPHOR.... collect definitions from search engines... put in your own words.... check out the stuff on metonymy in Kurt Vonnegut post in this forum

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## Maljackson

check out the stuff on metonymy in Kurt Vonnegut post in this forum


i cant find it

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## Sitaram

Kurt Vonnegut post.... also READ SOME OF THE ESSAYS AT THE KURT VONNEGUT ESSAY SITE... they are excellent, and will give you a feeling for how to write.....

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ead.php?t=3887

Here is an interesting collection of students essays on Vonnegut:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html


Cat's Cradle and Postmodernism


http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/...tmodernism.html


The first sentence of "Cat's Cradle" is itself a nuclear device packed with power : "Call me Jonah." This name could be
easily connected with the biblical Jonah, who was swallowed
by a giant whale on the way to Ninive. The name Jonah does
not have only biblical connotations though; it refers also
to the Melville's Moby Dick. Peter Reed in his book about
Vonnegut writes about this point: "It is characteristic
that Vonnegut's speaker should be a Jonah, who gets
swallowed by the whale, rather than a whale-hunting
Ishmael." This opinion is understandable, when we take into
consideration, that Jonah from Cat's Cradle was not hunting
any whale, which could be represented by Bokononism. On the
contrary, he readily accepted this religion and in the end
was completely swallowed by these "harmful lies", just like
Jonah by the whale in the biblical story.

=============

I became curious about the word "metonymical," which is used several times in the above essay on Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and Postmodernism. I like to learn new things.

The following, courtesy of Google, is quite instructive:

a figure of speech in which the poet substitutes a word normally associated with something for the term usually naming that thing (for example, "big-sky country" for western Canada). The association can be cause-and-effect, attribute-of, instrument-for, etc. 
www.creativestudios.com/lit/glossary2.html


a figure of speech in which an attribute is substituted for the whole 
www.mantex.co.uk/samples/eng.htm


A figure of speech in which one word is substituted for another with which it is closely associated. For example, in the expression The pen is mightier than the sword, the word pen is used for the written word, and sword is used for military power. 
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903237.html


A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power. 
sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/archive/00000023/01/HTML_Version/text/node83.html


substitution of a word or phrase with another which it suggests. "The pen is mightier than the sword," in which both "pen" and "sword" are substituted for "written prose" and "military." See also: synecdoche. 
rinkworks.com/words/linguistics.shtml


a kind of connotation where in one sign is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power. 
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiot...erminology.html


the use of the name of one thing for something else with which it is associated. Example: Neil reads Shakespeare while driving a Ford. 
www.humanities.eku.edu/Glossary.htm


Metonymy from the Greek words [meta] meaning 'change,' and [onoma] meaning 'name.' Thus it is a name or figure of speech which represents something else which is associated with it in some fashion. For example, if we're drinking water, and we ask if we can 'have another glass,' the word glass is a metonymy for more water. 
mountainretreat.org/glossary.html


/ substitution of one word for another which it suggests. *He is a man of the cloth. *The pen is mightier than the sword. *By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread. (A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples, Ross Scaife) 
www.iprr.org/defs/DEFINMNO.html


Figurative language where one term is used in place of something else that it is related to or often associated with; like saying the White House for the president, or Hollywood for the American film industry. 
http://www.viterbo.edu/personalpage...lary%20page.htm


A figure of speech involving the designation of something by means of a related notion, e.g. "wheels" meaning "automobile" (see also synecdoche). 
fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/glossary.htm


Referring to a concept by an attribute of it. For example, the crown referring to a monarch. See also synecdoche. 
www2.parc.com/istl/groups/hdi/sensemaking/glossary.htm


- the linking of one sign with another to form a context "the cat is on the mat"; a relation based on combination and contiguity. Or something stands in for the whole: "All hands on deck". 
http://www.merz-akademie.de/projekt...sycho/defin.htm


 a type of metaphor in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it. 
courses.lib.odu.edu/engl/emcavoy/glosslit.htm


a figure of speech that makes a term closely related to something serve as its substitute 
www.english.udel.edu/spardee/poterms.html


figure of speech in which an object is described by its function or parts (e.g. "the kettle is boiling" -- it is the water within which boils, not the kettle itself). [top] 
schools.brunnet.net/internetucation/gap/glossary.html


the signifying process by which an entity is used to refer to another that is related to it 
http://www.oswego.edu/~thoffman/sem...activity_1.html


Describing or naming one thing by something similar. Meaning is inferred. Ex: "The fat lady sings." 
faculty.valencia.cc.fl.us/drogers/poetry/ptrygl.html


substituting the name of an attribute or feature for the name of the thing itself (as in `they counted heads') 
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

================

This essay and its excerpt are worthy of consideration:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/...chronicity.html

Kurt Vonnegut's universal acclaim and appeal surely comes in no small
part from his gift for connecting, almost unnoticiably, seemingly
unrelated objects and events to give them deeper meaning,
creating a phenomenon known within Jungian circles as
synchronicity. By making his novel so multi-layered by drawing
these comparisons, such as in being transported from a train car
into a POW camp to an extraterrestrial spaceship that hums like
a melodious owl, human beings being trapped within each moment in
time like an insect in amber, and the writer's own repetition of
his current project to a jokey old song, the writer gives us
a deeper insight into the real multi-layeredness of space and
time.

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## Scheherazade

Maljackson,
I am not sure what you are studying although you mention that you are a first year student. Sitaram's advice is invaluable. He is both very experienced and knowledgeble but I will add couple of humble suggestions as well. Before you start:
-Do you really know what metaphor means? Since this is your assignment, you must have done some studying in the class regarding this. What examples your teacher has provided?
-What purpose does it serve? I.e., how could you express something with and without a metaphor and what change does it make? 

-Think of this passage:
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:

Shakespeare does not say simply "Juliet is beatiful" but by uses metaphors. Why do you think? What sort of effect does this have on reader?

-How long is the text for your assignment supposed to be? 

Wish you all the best.

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## Maljackson

my assigment is meant to be 1500-2000 words long and i must refer to either poetry, drama or prose fiction.

ive just found out that i must refer to either William Shakespear The tempest or Heany's North.

Sitiram ..there has been a new twist in our adventure. which one shall i chose? In relation to the question we have been discussing

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## Sitaram

sparknotes may help you www.sparknotes.com (with ideas that is).... lots more material on net re: Shakespeare I should Imagine.... google.com on : Shakespeare "Wallace Stevens" metaphor

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## Sitaram

BINGO! Look what I just found in google. See anything familiar?

http://www.willamette.edu/~blong/Eve.../Metaphor.html

Metaphor et al.
Bill Long 12/03/04

Sorting out Some Terms

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor"--WALLACE STEVENS 

One of the reasons that literary criticism never appealed to me is as an academic discipline that I quickly became confused by all the verbiage of the critics and didn't understand what they were saying. Perhaps I was immature at the time, however, and didn't have the self-confidence to ask them what they meant by their terms. Perhaps I wasn't able or willing to hold them down until they had actually made themselves clear. But, in any case, I find myself returning to literary/rhetorical terms much later in life, with a desire to try to sort out what is meant by metaphor, metonomy, metalepsis, irony, synecdoche and other words. 

What you find, at first glance, is that no one seems to know what any of the terms mean with any precision. The purpose of this and the next mini-essay is to try to massage these terms, especially with the help of Puttenham, to see if we can come up with a satisfactory language to describe some of the wonderful ways that we might use language. 

Major Classificatory Schemes

Quintilian, the 1st century (CE) Roman orator divides words into tropes and schemes, the former having to do with "turns" (derived from the Greek trophos--turning) of phrases while latter has to do with the "forms" (schema is the Greek word for form) of individual words. 

Petrus Ramus, the 16th century grammarian and teacher of rhetoric, then divides words into four categories: irony, metonomy, metaphor and synecdoche. The words are meant to suggest a graded degree of likeness to what one might term a literal similarity with the term compared. That is, irony expresses a relationship between concepts that are unrelated; metaphor is used to connect concepts that are apparently unrelated but have some similarities; metonomy suggests words that are "adjuncts" or closely associated to each other; and synecdoche speaks of words that are "contained in" other words. 

Roman Jakobson, the 20th century literary critic, is indebted to Ramus and divides words into the two broad categories of metaphor and metonomy, with the former stressing the apparent unrelatedness of terms ("similarity despite difference") while the latter asserts a direct connection ("contiguity") between words.

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## Maljackson

wooohoo.

I never thought theory would get me this excited!

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## Maljackson

u really are a magician of the net

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## Sitaram

Its really just simple common sense, and lots of practice

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## Maljackson

Now my problem is how to relate this all to shakespears the tempest

alot of reading i guess.

Im gonna have to pick out some references from the tempest which will be quite a bother.

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## Maljackson

Sparknotes doesnt have much in relation to metaphor buts its pretty darn useful

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## Sitaram

I was thinking about sparknotes in relation to SHAKESPEARE, more than "metaphor"

There is tons of stuff in the search engines on metaphor, just like all that metonymy stuff I found in the Vonnegut post

Ask and ye shall receive,
Seek and ye shall find,
Knock and it shall be opened unto you... (or something like that)

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## Scheherazade

I guess you have read it in class? Otherwise your teacher wouldn't insist on these two texts especially?

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## Maljackson

ok thanks for your helps guys.

before i go can you help me on how i shall structure my essay?

Introductions and conclusions have always bothered me.

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## Sitaram

Go here:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html

read a bunch of essays.....

notice the structure...

===============================

"Then Judas went and hanged himself"

"Therefore, go thou and do likewise" (two unrealted Biblical verses..... its a JOKE guys)

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## Maljackson

thanks for your help sitaram.

u are a legend

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## Scheherazade

Nice verses, Sitaram...
I like my new signature a lot too... I remembered it last night while trying to sleep and had to get up and google to find the exact proverb.

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## Sitaram

There is a non-Arabic proverb I once read:

"Wisdom diminishes arrogance." (but it never caught on in the Emirates)

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## Scheherazade

LOL!
Probably because it has not proved correct so far!  :Wink:

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## Maljackson

Scheherazade- can i ask you..why do you think the metaphor is siginificant?

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## Sitaram

If we may coin a metaphor, wisdom in those desert lands is like water to a ducks back. They have made a most admirable resistance to its invasion.

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## Scheherazade

Which one is more effective? More appealing? 
Juliet is beautiful.
Juliet is the sun.

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## Sitaram

I would choose a compromise of Juliet sunbathing in her garden, LIKE Susanna

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## Scheherazade

> wisdom in those desert lands is like water to a ducks back.


That would be a simile...

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## Sitaram

A solar Juliet is unapproachable, I suppose, distant,.... HOT

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## Sitaram

http://knowgramming.com/metaphors/me...difference.htm

A metaphor is an equation where a simile is an approximation. A simile - to be like something - is to retain some difference which means one can never fully substitute the other. On the other hand, a metaphor actually is a substitution - it is an equation in principle. 

A good book is like a good meal; a simile suggesting that a book may be as mentally nourishing and satisfying as a meal.

A wire is a road for electrons; a metaphor suggesting that electrons use a wire as a road to travel on.


In math, I could say that 99 is approximately equal to (or "like") 100 - that would be a simile; but an equation, such as A=B means that if A+3=10 then B+3=10. A simile may be difficult to extend further, but the nature of a good metaphor is that it may always be extended, reversed, re-substituted with other elements and so on (just as an algebraic expression* can).

Sometimes, we will build both a metaphor and a simile from the same parts, showing how incredibly close these two literary devices are. Compare "a car is like a cell: it travels along a vessel of asphalt" with "a car is a cell...". When building a simile, it helps to keep it clearly removed from a metaphor: "clouds like cotton candy" is clearly a simile.

Typically, if you need to explain it, it's probably a simile; if it makes instant sense to someone, it's probably a metaphor. If it uses the words "is like" or "is as", it is usually a simile or a misstated metaphor; if it uses the word "is", without "as" or "like", it is usually a metaphor or a misstated simile. Because there is so much confusion surrounding the difference between metaphor and simile, the two are often misstated.

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## Sitaram

http://www.belperschool.co.uk/Subjec...nification.php

Check It Out
A dead metaphor is one that has been used so often that we have stopped being aware of it. The phrases are so commonly used that the discrepancies involved in the description are ignored.

The leg of the table Youre breaking my heart The heart of the matter 

Phrases like these, which are extremely overused, are sometimes called clichés. Everyday use of language contains many examples of phrases like this: phrases we all take for granted as literal but which are actually examples of imagery.



Questions

Why do writers use imagery? 
What is the difference between a simile and a metaphor? 
What is personification? 

Do the following sentences contain a simile, metaphor or personification?

She was as ugly as a bulldog chewing a wasp! 
When that sixth number popped up, the future smiled at me 
The moon winked between the storm clouds 
Hail hit the roof like bullets from a machine-gun 
The defender stuck to the forward like glue 
This classroom is a bomb-site! Clear it up now! 
The trees were naked. Below them little boys kicked their way through milk-less cornflakes 


It is often quite simple to change similes into metaphors and metaphors into similes. For example, when Robert Burns (1759-96) wrote

O my loves like a red, red rose 

he was using a simile. If he had written O my love is a red, red rose however, he would have been using a metaphor.

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## Scheherazade

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/defi...0141&dict=CALD
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/defi...3743&dict=CALD


************

In literary terms, 'Juliet is the sun' says more to us, addressing to our imagination; whether Sitaram can handle HOT objects is subject for another discussion  :Wink:

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## Sitaram

The final resort of the desperate is often ad hominem.

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## Scheherazade

And first one of a lady is to overlook such.

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## Maljackson

sitiram u still here?

Ive just found out i must relate to Heanys North!

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## Sitaram

I am here... Say but the word and your soul shall be healed....


Go, and sin no more.....

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## Sitaram

I have written down some thoughts on metaphor in a new thread:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...4143#post54143

I hope some of this helps you in your efforts to produce a paper by Friday.

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