Outstanding Metaphors

Metaphors are the bane of every high school English student’s existence. “Why can’t they just say what they  mean?” students often complain.

“Because metaphors are beautiful,” I would reply. 

I was wrong – well, partly wrong.

While reading the book Sunshine by Robin McKinley, I had a metaphor-related epiphany. [ Side note: If you haven’t read anything by Robin McKinley yet and you like fantasy, I am delighted to recommend her; she is one of my favorite authors. The Blue Sword is my personal favorite out of all of her novels, but Chalice is good as well.] The main character is a baker at a local café. One day she is sitting in her car and a leaf lands on her windshield. I don’t have the exact quote – alas! I had no idea how this minor metaphor would change my life – but she compared the leaf to a slivered almond. I paused – which is a big deal when I am reading, because I don’t even pause to eat sometimes. I pictured the leaf perfectly in my mind, not because I knew what leaves looked like (though I do) but because I knew what slivered almonds looked like, and I could imagine a leaf that looked like that. And I realized that I was picturing EXACTLY the same leaf that McKinley had been picturing. She could have just said leaves. She could have said autumn leaves and been trite. But she had used a metaphor that communicated her idea perfectly.

Then it dawned on me. As teachers, our job is (wait for it) to teach students new concepts. One of the very big parts of teaching is something called scaffolding which, as I’m sure you could figure out yourself, means you take what you want your students to learn and use their prior knowledge to help them learn it.

For example, if my students don’t understand what dramatic irony is I say, “You know how in every scary movie there is a scene where a girl dressed in her pajamas decides to go explore the basement to see what all those creepy noises are about, but we know that a vicious killer is down there because we saw him break into the basement in the previous scene? And everyone in the theater wants to scream at the stupid girl to go back upstairs and call the cops because there is a madman in her basement? That’s dramatic irony.” I took something they didn’t understand – dramatic irony – and explained it to them using something they did understand – horror films.

That is exactly what an outstanding metaphor (or simile – it works the same way) does. It takes an idea and explains it clearly – and uniquely – using something we know.

The major difference between scaffolding and metaphors is that usually metaphors don’t introduce completely new concepts, but instead introduces familiar concepts in completely new ways. Here is an example:

“Hands, like secrets, are the hardest thing to keep from you.” [“Dismantle” by Anberlin]

Here, the songwriter doesn’t think that his listeners have never been in love or wanted physical contact with someone they love; instead, he isn’t sure they’ve experienced it the same way. So he uses a simile to help communicate his experience. For him, restraining physical touch is as impossible as restraining from communicating. From this simile, we see complex layers of a relationship that involves not just desire, but an emotional connection, a friendship, a sharing of life together in multiple ways.

And, I must admit, he says all of that much more beautifully and succinctly than I just did simply by using a simile.

This is why cliché metaphors are so meaningless – they don’t show things to us in a new way or reveal new complexity because they are overused. When someone says their heart is broken that doesn’t really tell me anything other than that they are sad. I have heard that metaphor so much that it doesn’t communicate anything more than literal language would. But if someone tells me that their “heart is an empty room” (Death Cab for Cutie) I learn that they feel they have no one to love, they feel desolate, they feel perhaps abandoned.

Thanks to Robin McKinley, I no longer torment my students by telling them that authors only use metaphors because they are pretty. Now I say, “Authors use metaphors because they are beautiful, but most importantly they use metaphors because we learn through metaphor. We can only learn something new by using what we already know to build that new knowledge. Metaphors help you understand something new, something different, something better.”

What outstanding metaphors have you stumbled across in your reading?