#extended metaphor

[fuckingwhateverdude]

@nosebleedclub / sept. #9

[env0writes]

A Feud to Carry Vol. 2, 2.12.24 “Lessons of the Third Degree”

Youth, unfettered by worries Full of gusto and unearned confidence To the field of battle you go To the field, you’ll fall, of woe Yes, you are trained Pained as I am to admit You will struggle and fall No matter my shouts or my call Should you return from this chore This foolhardy errand of proof What lesson is to be learned Not from teachers that you’ve spurned Broken crown and name as black as your eyes As your belt, bearing the brunt of each welt Do you wish to be a star? Grasping at aspirations near and far? The folly of youth, follow thy father The world is yours to venture into Let me pack your lunch and wrap your hands So that I may trust you’ll overcome when things stray from plans

@env0writes C.Buck   Ko-Fi & Venmo: @Zenv0 Support Your Local Artist!   Photo by @mynamemeanscloud

[skylerchasesbooks]

How To Use Extended Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary device that figuratively compares and equates two things that are not alike. An extended metaphor is a version of metaphor that extends over the course of multiple lines, paragraphs, or stanzas of prose or poetry. Extended metaphors build upon simple metaphors with figurative language and more varied, descriptive comparisons.

The core structure of every metaphor consists of two parts called the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the root idea that the metaphor starts with and the vehicle is the second concept that the metaphor figuratively compares the first to.

Some metaphors occur naturally as you develop your piece and can easily be integrated into your work.

Tips To Write It:

1. Think about the central themes you’re exploring: Most extended metaphors highlight central symbols or themes. Regardless of whether you are writing a poem, novel, play, or essay, think about the major themes of your work and which you think would be best served through extended metaphor.

2. Brainstorm compelling images: Once you’ve settled on the starting tenor for your metaphor, free associate some compelling images and comparisons that the tenor evokes for you. Spend some time compiling a list of the possible vehicles that you’ve generated.

3. Find a clear comparison: Choose a metaphorical comparison that is both evocative and clear. It shouldn’t be a leap for your reader to follow the logic of your metaphor. A good metaphor draws a natural comparison but isn’t overly obvious or literal.

4. Overwrite: After you’ve settled on the tenor and vehicle of your metaphor, start to extend it over several lines or paragraphs. Allow yourself to overwrite, exploring the various ways you can illustrate the comparison and reveal different facets of your metaphor.

5. Edit: Once you feel like you’ve generated enough material, edit down your extended metaphor to its most evocative and effective parts. Even though extended metaphors are longer than simple metaphors, you still want to have concise and pithy prose. Choose the sections that are most necessary to your piece and edit out the rest.

Eg of this literary device:

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken: In perhaps his most famous poem, Robert Frost extends the metaphor of a road twisting its way through a yellow wood being to a long life full of ups and downs. The central image is of a fork in the road which Frost equates to a pivotal life decision. The poem is one of the most popular in contemporary culture and is an iconic and accessible example of extended metaphor at play.

Using extended metaphor in your writing may seem difficult at first. The more you look for extended metaphors in books or poems you're reading and challenge yourself to employ them in your own work, the easier they will start to come.

Hope it helps! Like, Share and Follow For more!

[mysteriouspresence]

musing #19

i changed the title because this one (from jul 21, 2020) is a little different:

it's not a poem, per se, it's more of prose, but it's still a short work centered around metaphors.

Asclepius

The most frightening people are those who are right in all the wrong ways.

He wasn't a bad doctor, it's just that none of his patients lived.

In fact, one could say that he was an excellent doctor, all of his patients were cured of their pain and suffering, which is the main reason for visiting a physician in the first place.

The solution is valid, but whether or not it's correct, is up to the individual to judge.

And they chose him. They came prepared. They knew the cost of relief.

Just because some of them suffered maladies no other doctor could detect, doesn’t mean they didn’t need a cure.

And some of them were the disease themselves.

The most frightening ideas are the ones that are right in all the wrong ways.

[sleepy-academia]

i see you in the laurel crowns in every final page of gold that has each virtue sung for years and every bitterness untold i see you in the laurel crowns in every name that weathers time a stony figure, stony heart that wields the pen and knows to hide i see you in the laurel crowns and on each icy iron edge a truth infecting all your words locked in the pages left unread i see you in the legends told and all my scars, my bruises old.

[uschi-the-listener]

Coffee

Say you've never had coffee so the first time you have it you don't know if it's good or bad

you can tell if you like it or not

you don't but there is nothing else on offer

so you drink coffee that's all there is though there isn't much to recommend it

you can't survive without it

you see other people having coffee liking it having special kinds going to special places to get their favorites

you don't have that option but you plan to some day when it's possible

ads call it "rich" "flavorful" people talk about needing it and you understand that last part

then one day you get other coffee

coffee from someplace else

and lo! and behold! it's good! you like it!

Coffee was always supposed to be like this and you never knew

how could you know? you always had black bitter gritty functionally tasteless an assault on your senses

lousy 'coffee'

this is not that you don't really know how to handle it

always before you got away with as little contact as possible

now, you want more

you didn't know and it's a shock

almost like they were doing it on purpose

[archivingheartbeats]

Old loves are the database

I still keep in my collection:

The dictionary of all your

Terms and our idioglossary,

Thesaurus of shared associations,

Encyclopedia detailing

Your collection of passions,

Dietary needs,

Childhood dreams and triggers.

I tried to learn you through and through,

Visited your library

Until I knew its shelving oddities.

I borrowed your vocabulary

Until mere synonyms felt wrong,

And can still call up from memory

Cross-references for meaningful gifts

For a version of you who no longer exists.

Perhaps someday I'll bury them

Beneath new knowledge,

Until the details fade.

Perhaps someday you'll be

Almost as far from my mind

As a used textbook given

To the second-hand shop.

[the-liliger]

Poem - #6

"Faith" Is The River

“Faith” is the river. A bumpy current, Slow - or - sped. Full of turns, Pools and stops. The river can flow, Up - down. North and South. Waters clear, And murky. Full of life, And it’s cycle. Souls lost and without hope, Follow the river, And get back home. See - “faith” - is the river, A - giver - for thee.

[ruby-tuessdaay]

Tickets

By Ruby Reed

.

.

I am waiting for a train that will never arrive

My bag is empty and my ticket contrived

From my mind I wrote where I wished to go

I wrote the line, the time all penciled in by my designs

I am waiting for a train that will never arrive and I'm ready to

Go

Above cars plow through ice and snow but I remain underground

Where my train goes I do not know

I did once.

I think it must have been somewhere pleasant

But I forgot long ago

I am waiting for a train that will never arrive even though I know it will never arrive

I've waited here So many hours. So many days. So many times.

I don't count anymore

I'm waiting for a train that will never arrive because

I can't give my ticket up now

I've spent every dollar to my name

sold out everything I loved to ride this train

I will not let my efforts end in vain

I am waiting for a train that will never arrive

With a ticket that shouldn't exist

Or maybe it should

I've bought too many for it to be a mistake

I sleep on the platform and whenever I wake

I check the boards and my train IS on it

But

no time follows

I'm waiting for a train that will never arrive

My morale has held out

But it cannot survive

[fuckingwhateverdude]

things to do on a saturday

[env0writes]

Idle Steps 3.5.24 “Devotional Noose"

Little flower, pink and round And gazing lily-lipped to the sky Ill fated or poorly timed, bursting from ground With vibrato vibrancy in my eye Striking upon field-napped eyes with stronger color Smiley-toothed clouds watching over your bashful bloom How are you grown so budding small and sure? A pastel pasture amidst concrete doom Autumnal stamen making me pray, “Amen” Wreathed in pale sunset blacks and pink-parking lot hues What wretched fortune to be found here in this when Surrounded by monochrome, yearning for technicolor; blues Is it apparent, an obvious petal fallen? Rosy-hipped saunter towards the sun Enduring proximity, stifling, maudlin Should I pick you? Will you survive past day one? Kind little flower, oh, beauteous beast Why must your radiance rise up the least?

@env0writes C.Buck   Ko-Fi & Venmo: @Zenv0 Support Your Local Artist!   Photo by @env0

[behind-the-veil-of-sanity]

The ladling out of fried crumbs to an unset table, whispering Grace to the shrouded few; saucy steamy vegetables favoured dishes while deep fried fish ignored.

[howifeltabouthim]

While I was thinking these thoughts a little stream was running softly somewhere in my mind, a little stream of reminiscence. What was it? Something was asking to be remembered. I . . . followed without haste the course of my reverie, waiting for the memory to declare itself.

Iris Murdoch, from Under the Net

[sleepy-academia]

head space

(photo source) (edited by my best friend y.m.)

I’ve learned to ignore the dripping. When it lands in the kitchen sink and stops my hands for just a moment, as if a question hung in the air. When it hits the page I’m writing as the clock tick tick ticks and blinds me, shining across the paper in a constellation of uncertainty. When it hovers and I can feel it behind me like someone tall or quiet or dangerous.

Sometimes I glance at it - this mass of stars and moons and planets that always looms in the corners of my eyes. It would dot my vision throughout the day with Ursa Major and Minor if I haven’t slept. Or if someone’s voice had struck my eardrums and reverberated and shook my brain into a frenzy ‘till I’d forgotten what they’d even said. Or if my own voice had leapt from my throat before I could pass it through the conveyor belt of filters, an industrial discord built on social order and manufactured sense. Or if I’d met eyes with the moon at 1 A.M. and felt just reckless enough to turn around, demand that the mess give an answer for itself.

I get stuck then. I’m the character in the horror film who’d just found the monster leering back. I’m a freeze frame. It’s been a long time coming. It’s without a cure.

It’s everything I haven’t been or learned to be yet. It’s beyond the day and its schedule. It’s less-than-content to be here. It’s the skeptic. It’s the future. It’s the past. It’s I wish it was or I miss them or Okay, now what. It’s a moment to change the lens and hating what I find.

I have friends who describe these kinds of feelings as 'icky,’ and that’s pretty accurate. It just gets everywhere and messes things up, painting the solid sidewalks and traceable lines with constellations in the form of question marks.

It’s only been watered down since I’ve started therapy. “I’m not used to this,” I told my therapist.

“Used to what?” she asked.

“Thinking too much about it. I don’t feel good when it happens this often.”

“Well, that’s how you fix it,” she told me, as if this was completely obvious from the maddening depths of this strange outer space. “You gotta look at it and take it apart, and then you can work on how to solve these things.”

But unlike the kitchen each night, this isn’t as easy as cleaner and elbow grease. This is a bedroom marred up by the mess, droplets of stars everywhere, until the dust bunnies outnumber the hours of sleep. Solve it? It hadn’t been a thing to solve for 15 years. Even when it was growing—this huge icky mess really was 17 years in the making—it was nothing. It never crested like a wave about to eat everything in sight, never once, not until—

“I wish I never found out.”

“Found out what?”

“I don’t know. That’s just the feeling. Like, now that I know, I can’t really go back.”

“But just because you didn’t know about it, does that mean it wasn’t there?”

Sometimes, I act like seeing is believing.

Sometimes, it’s something to get out of sight. The relatives who would only see the bottle if it was shattered, stars and planets and a stretched-out daughter leaking onto the floor. The peers that deserve better than to hear about the newest astral body I found, or where I am when I’ve checked out of Earth at 1 A.M. The inanimate things that lock eyes with me when I take the occasional detour to space, seeing all but saying nothing.

This kind of outer space isn’t the common night sky. It isn’t just the blues and purples and sleepy, momentary relief. It isn’t just the heroic escape from UFO abductions told time and time again. It is the freezing cold and the lack of oxygen, a lone astronaut’s nights at 1 A.M. not knowing where they are. A freeze frame, a scribbled sheet of paper, a full kitchen sink.

And there’s the solitude. That the things that chase you are yours in the end. Your feet need to move for you to turn around.

It’s mentioned time and time again how vast space is, and how little we are against it, but you never really know about it until you feel it on your shoulders. But you can’t go through life thinking everything revolves around the Earth.

“What do I do now?”

“Well, I think you’re in the middle of it all now. If you stopped addressing this all of a sudden, you would know all these problems are there and have nothing to solve them with.”

I said something to agree with her. To get rid of this thing was to keep flushing it out. It felt so wrong to let it run thinner, swell bigger and bigger - but I knew she was right.

“Would you like to keep seeing me?”

“Yeah…I mean, I know that I have to. I’ll see you next week?”

“See you next week.”

[owlbloop]

There are shadows soft as flame

Who swallow creatures all the same

With teeth and claws we cannot see

Until with them is our final pleas

-

The ghosts of someones

That we used to be

The flickering suns

Like twigs of a tree

-

All in their grip

With things on their lips

Things we once saved

Never to say

-

While we wait

For the next summer's day

[theysayshannon]

In Conversation with “The Quiet Machine” by Ada Limón

I’m learning so many different ways to get bruised. There’s when I slip on the ice outside my door. There’s also when I slip on nothing at all. There’s when someone accidentally knocks into me with their elbow or when they knock into me with their elbow on purpose. Sometimes I bruise when I don’t even know it, like hitting my hip against the counter (I think). Then sometimes there’s the “I did it to my self” bruises, which are most of them, but other times it’s the bruises I can’t even see that hurt. Grief. Heartache. There’s the bruises that start small and stay small and the ones that take forever to go away and the ones that I wish I’d never gotten and the ones I know I deserve so that’s what I say sometimes when I discover a new bruise - “I deserve this,” and sometimes it’s one of those bruises that I don’t even know where it came from. That’s how I hurt.