Now, metaphor [SOUND] is a comparison between two things. On the surface, this might seem pretty simple but metaphor gains its juice from how different the two things are. So they're actually more about contrast than similarity or comparison. They have to do these things simultaneously. So, how about an example. Let's say that you have a shark and you have a fish. Now, that's hardly a metaphor. To say the shark was a fish is actually more a statement of fact than a literary figure. If you want to gain a little bit more juice out of that, then you have to find a way to find some difference. Let's say you have a fish and you have a basketball shoe. [SOUND] Fish, basketball shoe. Now, suddenly, your reader's sitting there thinking how is the statement, "The fish was a basketball shoe?"... How is that going to be? What universe will that actually function in? Where is a fish going to help me with my hang time? Well, that's the poet's work when using the metaphor. It's to create the possibility that these two things that seem to be dissimilar, actually have something in common and that is where a lot of the ideas of the poem can come from, making that point believable. There are other forms of comparison. Like, for example, let's try a simile. [SOUND] A simile is a kind of comparison similar to a metaphor but it uses 'like' or 'as' to emphasize the similarity but like the metaphor the comparison needs contrast to really make it stick. So if I were to say, "A fish is like a basketball shoe", then we're in the realm of simile versus metaphor ("A fish IS a basketball shoe"). Now, what does that 'like' do? Well, when we say 'like' it sort of signals us to be alert to the fact that we are going to be observing certain similarities between a fish and a basketball shoe. But we're ultimately saying that the fish is not [SOUND] a basketball shoe, it's only that it's similar. Now, again, this might seem to be a relatively simple distinction but that trigger to your reader to pay attention to the fact that they're not exactly the same thing can create an entirely different understanding of the poem. A poem that calls a fish a basketball shoe might be saying something a little bit more of what we might call surreal, strange or mystical, or non sequitur or nonsensical. But saying it is like a basketball shoe doesn't absolutely change the nature of the fish into that of a basketball shoe or vice versa. It allows the fish and the basketball shoe to remain themselves but simply point out some kind of similarity. There are still other comparisons that we could use within writing our poems. For example, we might have synecdoche. [SOUND] Synecdoche uses a part of a thing to stand in for the whole thing. Synecdoche might take the fish and remove only the fish's fin. Let's just think of that fin, right. Now that fin is a part of the fish but if we say, "Silver fins swim through the water" or "several fins made their way through the brine", we might be able to assume that, well, the fins aren't moving all on their own. So they must be connected to something, so probably, fish. There is yet another way of having this kind of comparison. For example, we might use metonymy. [SOUND] Now, metonymy is when you use something associated with the thing as a stand in for it. If I were to tell you that there was big news from the Oval Office today, 'Oval Office' in this example is actually associated with the current presidential administration. So the translation would be, there was big news from the current presidential administration. Otherwise the images of the Oval Office going, I have big news, which is fascinating but doesn't really happen. Now, since we're talking about fish and basketball shoes, a metonym for fish, perhaps we would say fish net, right? And if we were trying to create a metonym for basketball shoe, we might say, a great big shoe box. And this next one is probably a bit more familiar to us than metonyms and synecdoches are: Personification. [SOUND] Personification is when we give human qualities or expressions or experiences or subjectivity to nonhuman things. So if we were to say something to the effect of, "the jealous fish", or "the menacing basketball shoe", these would be examples of personification. All of these, metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, these are all figures of speech and they are tools that we can use within our poems to great effect. You will oftentimes see them used in any number of poems but we're now going to talk about how they're used in a specific poem, and as we prepare for that, I just want to say, I hope you're hungry.
