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Home > Resources > Resource Exchange > Writing > Figurative Language

Figurative Language

Contributed by Suzanne Clark, English

Literary language makes notable use of figures such as metaphor, metonymy, simile, anaphora (repetition), personification, and many others to heighten attention to language itself and its symbolic, emotional, mythic, or uncanny dimensions.  Thus the analysis of figure often becomes a significant part of interpretation, tracing possible internal connections in the text and the textual resonance with cultural and psychic themes. W.B. Yeats writes tellingly about the emotional power of language:

. . .take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its place in a story, and see how it flickers with the light of the many symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may flicker with the light of burning towers.
    All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. (from "The Symbolism of Poetry")

According to modern formalist critics, poetic language can be read as different from ordinary uses of language, though all language may be figurative.  In addition to providing emotional resonance, figure in a literary text may defamiliarize,  mark something strange or disruptive or unexpected or not part of common speech.  Common speech, e.g. 'the sun came up,' is made up of expressions that cause no particular notice--that are used unconsciously--even though they are metaphorical.  Cliches are figures on their way to becoming unconscious, although the disappearing meanings may be of considerable significance.  For example, "the cold war" was a phrase that once had powers to make readers see the period after World War II in a new way, but we now take it for granted as the term for that period, without thinking twice whether it should be called a 'war' OR 'cold'. Metaphors and other figures of poetic language strike us, then,  because they have a certain intensity or surprise, and make us look at the language itself and interrogate it.  Often they are not common or familiar--they may even be shocking or ugly--but rather suggest comparisons that lead us to realize we must interpret  their significance.  For example, Eliot's famous opening line of The Waste Land are cryptic:  "April is the cruellest month."  We know we'll have to read on to know what that might mean.  Even the simplest, most realistic-seeming language may have a figurative resonance, perhaps because of its sounds, its rhythms, its associations, and the way the writer has brought these together.  Hemingway, for example, has written an apparently clear description of fishing in "Big Two-Hearted River" that has brought readers back again and again to try to explain why it seems to have such a strong impact on them:

He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone.  Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water.  The trout was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel, beside a stone.  As Nick's fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream.

Metaphor is the comparison of things that are not alike.  It is related to analogy, allegory, and symbolism.  Marianne Moore says in "The Pangolin" that the 'impressive animal" is a "near artichoke," comparing the appearances of armoured animal and vegetable.  She's also the poet who defined poems, in "Poetry," as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."  Are poems and gardens alike?  In containing 'real toads'?  The metaphor defamiliarizes, prompts thought. Zora Neale Hurston reports the poetic language of folk talk in Mules and Men.  For example:  "'Y'all lady people ain't smarter than all men folks.  You got plow lines on some of us, but some of us is too smart for you.  We go past you jus' like lightnin' thru de trees,' Willie Sewell boasted." Though 'figurative language' is sometimes seen in opposition to 'the literal,' many language theorists, philosophers, and scholars in the cognitive sciences regard figures such as metaphor as the building blocks of all language and meaning.  See, for example, Metaphors We Live By and other books by William Lakov.