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Metaphors in Poetry

This research examines the use and function of metaphors in poetry, with special reference to "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson, "Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. The research will set forth a working definition of metaphor and then discuss how metaphors work in these poems to move readers emotionally and to retain interest, with a view toward identifying what the use of metaphors has to do with the aesthetics of poetry.

It is a commonplace of elementary-school studies that a metaphor is "a figure of speech, an implied analogy in which one thing is imaginatively compared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing" (Morner and Rausch 131). But as Morner and Rausch explain, metaphors are not necessarily isolated to specific comparisons. Rather, a metaphor may be extended, or "sustained throughout the work and function[] as a controlling image" (132). Although each of the poems under consideration in this research uses isolated metaphors, each also makes use of extended metaphor to achieve poetic effect.

Rausch and Morner cite as an example of an extended metaphor Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," which narrates the story of a carriage ride as an extended metaphor for "our journey through life--childhood, maturity, death" (132). The images encountered during the journey are organized around a meditation of and acquiescence in the inevitability of death. The figure of Death itself is personified as a considerate and gracious friend whose "civility" overtakes and absorbs the vicissitudes--both labor and leisure--of the whole of life experience. The carriage passes the school, which stands for the learning processes of childhood, and the fact that the children are represented as striving rather than merely playing--and not in the classroom but at recess--demonstrates that youth is a period of naïve engagement with the cosmos...

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Metaphors in Poetry. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:04, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683090.html