Simon Armitage uses metaphor in many different ways in Not The Furniture Game and Mother.... He uses them to describe and build up characters, in most cases; he doesn’t use much narrative and instead uses metaphor to help you build up your own story, so the interpretation varies and creates a much larger story from such a small poem. Armitage uses metaphors as a simple listed comparison as well as an extended metaphor which continues throughout the whole poem. These lead to a strange structure as it is unrhymed. In Not The Furniture Game, there is also no obvious rhythm, however there are many poetic values of it such as how it is punctuated.
In the descriptive metaphors in Not The Furniture Game, Armitage builds up character very effectively using many semantic fields which link the man to a main field of terror. His shoulder blades are described as “two butchers at the meat cleaving competition.” This creates the image of him being a sharp, dangerous character. The description of his dog being a “sentry box with no-one in it” tells us even his possessions were scary, dangerous and the empty sentry box suggests they were soulless.
There are also many anthropomorphic metaphors. These make him sound disgusting and unquestionably abominable, like his toes which were “a nest of mice under the lawn mower.” This tells us how his toes are large and plagued, possibly very hairy. It also builds the picture of revealing this “nest of mice” by moving the lawn mower which represents something hiding his feet, conceivably his shoes.
The poem evidently suggests he was a very careless and rude speaker as it says he has the tongue of “an iguanodon.” The reference to this shows a strong harsh tongue as iguanodons are large and bulky which conv...
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...lso be very dangerous and easy to lose control however, unless you get accustomed to the difficult skill which could take a long time.
The allusion to “fingertips” grabbing the “last one-hundredth of an inch” shows the desperation with which the mother is clinging on to the ‘control’ she has over her child.
The “endless sky” the child is reaching for signifies infinite opportunities and experiences once freedom has been accomplished. This is where the child could fall or fly, which means he could succeed or perish in the harsh atmosphere of life.
Armitage experiments with metaphor in two different ways. The listed metaphors leave you with many different stories which could be created, however the extended metaphor creates a clear story in your head, though it hints at the story both literally and metaphorically and leaves the reader to push them together into one.
In Waddington’s poem he relates his story in the poem by expressing a paradox, alliteration and irony. The speaker uses the paradox, “the delicate delicate serpent of your lip...
The first literary device is a simile and it paints a picture in the readers head.
For instance the first chunk of the passage Richard Matheson operates a series of rhetorical devices to emphasize Robert Neville’s feelings such as , visual imagery and simile in line 1-3 from (He-Eyes) and more visual imagery on lines 4-5 (Robert-arm).Richard Matheson employs simile and visual imagery in a discrete manner and emphasizes that man’s skin to that “clammy turkey skin” and the visual imagery “red-splotched checks, the feverish eyes, “to highlight that Robert Neville is scared of the
The first aspect of language, which he uses is metaphor in the beginning of the poem when he is describing the dwarf sitting outside the church. He uses metaphor as he says, “The dwarf with his hands on backwards Sat, slumped like a half – filled sack On tiny twisted legs from which Sawdust might run.” The metaphor here of the dwarf sitting like a ‘half filled sack’ is describing the dwarf and how he has a deformed body. He is being compared to looking like a sack, which is slumped and half empty. This is effective as it seems as though the dwarf cannot help himself
In the Gift by Li-Young Lee metaphor expresses the theme that with the right amount of comfort and support the scary, deadly manifestations do not seem so bad anymore. An example of this is “And I recall his hands two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised over my head” (11.9-13). This compares the father’s hands to the epitome of tenderness and the fierceness of discipline. The father’s hands compare two different ideas based on what he chooses to use them for. This shoes how the father’s hands make the painful manifestations seem okay because of the care that they give. More examples of metaphors are “I can’t remember the tale but hear his voice still, a well of dark water a prayer” (11.6-8).
The book contains several metaphors, which can be analyzed. One of the metaphors, which have been identified in the book, is in the statement, “As Janie climbs the pear tree to see what exists around her, she sees the horizon” (Wall 45). The metaphor, which has been used in that phrase, is the horizon. Usually the horizon means that the sun might be setting. In the co...
“He would knock knock on my door, and I’d pretend to be asleep ‘til he got right next to the bed, then I would get up and jump into his arms,” (Beaty 2-4). A sentimental play between a son and father, but one morning the knock never sounded upon the door. “Until that day when the knock never came and my momma takes me on a ride past corn fields on this never ending highway ‘til we reach a place of high rusty gates,” (Beaty 6-7). As one can see, Beaty uses imagery to allow the reader to imagine the corn fields and the highway that seemed to extend for miles on end. Extensively, the mother had taken her son to visit his father in prison, but the boy did not comprehend the window separating him from his father. The boy tried effortlessly to break the glass so he could jump into his father’s arms, all the while his father sat silently and
metaphors. Were people of his time to read this book it's probable that they would understand, wheather they agree with the author's point of view or not, the
In the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” by Richard Connell, many different kinds of figurative language is used to develop the setting and mood. In the beginning, the author begins to describe the setting while the main character is on a boat. “The sea was as flat as a plate-glass window.” He used a simile to describe the location. It tells you the sea was flat, which makes it calm, but it is also odd, because the ocean is usually rough and has a lot of waves.
Metaphors show us how biased the narrator is and compare some of the problems that changed him to be perverse. The irony shown in the The Black Cat represents the narrator’s events and how his perverseness affected it. Symbolism is what displays the narrator’s blindness to his severe situation. It also symbolizes his self destruction. In the end do not let your perverseness decide but let your clear conscience dictate your
The poem told the story of a man who is inhibited by language, and has never quite had the ability to articulate his thoughts and feeling through words. It is said that his family members have tried
In The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon’s narrator Christopher addresses the concept of the metaphor in order to interpret why he thinks and feels as he does. Haddon brings out Christopher’s comparison of metaphors to lies in order to help the reader understand the basis of Christopher’s viewpoint of truth, love and lies. The concept of the metaphor is addressed in order to show how different Christopher is from other people in his viewpoint of his place in the world around him.
He uses many similes in his story. One example is on page 217 “the sea was as flat as a glass plate window’’. This simile helps the reader know the ocean had no waves and it was a calm night. On page 216 Connell writes “it's like moist black velvet” to describe the nights sky. This shows the reader how dark the sky is. It was important that he used similes because if he would have said the ocean had no waves and the sky was dark the reader wouldn't have been able to really understand what the sky and the ocean looked like. these quotes help the reader find and feel the mood of the page or story. the mood that these sentences are quite,creepy and you know from reading other stories that when its dark out or the seas are calm then something bad will
As you read the text, you come up with hundreds of metaphors. Found almost in every line, they adorn the speech and make it more effective. Most of those metaphors are used to highlight the contrast between t...
Furthermore, the relationship between the metaphorical linguistic expressions and the conceptual metaphors can be understood in the following way: the linguistic expressions (ways