Figures of Speech by Name: --> Metaphor

Let’s begin by stipulating that Ira Gershwin is not William Shakespeare. However, despite the gulf that separates their talents, they share some writing techniques that are useful tools for aspiring writers. For example, Shakespeare’s sonnet, That Time of Year, and Gershwin’s song, They Can’t Take That Away from Me*, are variations on a common template,
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The Forms of Things Unknown

For all the power of his poetry, volume of his vocabulary and sheer prolific output, Shakespeare seemed intent on telling us that we cannot know, truly know, what we most want to know, or even think we already know. We know this on several levels.

We’re frustrated enough that he left no correspondence, no diary, no memoir, no hand-written manuscripts.
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Characters, Actors and Figurative Language

Early in Henry VIII, Anne Bullen, young and beautiful, considers the prospect of a prosperous future. In the same scene, Anne’s companion, the old lady, sardonically remarks on her lost youth and unfulfilled aspirations for wealth and position at court. The contrast of these two characters is clear, but Shakespeare uses more than casting, makeup, costumes, or even the subject matter of their opening dialogue,
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Unhappy Fortune! The Plague in the Plays

Shakespeare killed scores of his characters — by sword, by dagger, by poison, by flame, by drowning, by hanging, by murder, by suicide, by accident — men, women, children, all ages, killed by many means, even by a bear. But the deaths of only two of his central characters can be attributed to the plague, and even then, only by proximate cause, not directly by the plague.
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Iago and Ulysses on Order and Degree

Ulysses and Iago express similar themes about order and degree. Iago speaks more specifically about seniority versus affections and recommendations.
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Lear: Act One Scene One

King Lear’s first scene is notable in its length and structure. At over 300 lines, with more characters on stage than in all but the last scene of the play, and being divided into three sub-scenes, this first scene is almost a play in itself.

It begins, as do so many of Shakespeare’s plays,
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Learning by Living

In Love’s Labors Lost, Armado’s exclamation about the boy’s “Sweet smoke of rhetoric” complements the boy’s previous remark about his “penny of observation.” These two metaphors capture Shakespeare’s genius, both to observe and to poetically express human nature. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, the country boy, not the nobility, possesses these qualities.
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Blood and Humanity

In the Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Morocco’s “And let us make incision for your love To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine,” introduces the theme of superficial differences masking intrinsic similarities, the most intrinsic being that we share a common humanity. It foreshadows Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed”
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Income Inequality

In Coriolanus, Menenius Agrippa extemporizes on an ancient version of modern day trickle-down economics. In his extended metaphor, Menenius compares the digestive and circulatory systems of the body to the economics of upper-class Romans massing wealth and food for their benefit, which he claims eventually circulates out to the masses for their benefit. The hungry poor are more persuaded by their empty stomachs than by Menenius’s intellectual reasoning and promises.
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Double Cherries and Drops of Water

In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Helena’s expression of love as a union that makes a couple one inseparable being —

We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
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Political Rhetoric and the Masses

Brutus’s tour de force of interwoven rhetorical devices in Julius Caesar (3.2.14) sways the crowd away from their anger at the assassins to cheering them. This speech, however, is outdone by Mark Antony’s masterpiece of manipulation (3.2.82), which whiplashes the crowd back to outrage and riot. But, in fact, Brutus had failed in his speech even before Mark Antony opened his mouth.
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Hamlet’s First Soliloguy

This is Hamlet’s first extended soliloquy.
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Tombs and Wombs

Friar Lawrence’s rumination on soil as both a tomb and a womb works as a metaphor of one of the play’s central themes. The “misadventure’d piteous overthrows” of Romeo and Juliet in the Capulet tomb at the end of the play gave birth to a growth of amity between their two families.
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Caves, Temples & Palaces

Juliet’s biting reference to Romeo as “a gorgeous palace,” when she hears that Romeo has killed her cousin, contrasts with Romeo’s earlier reference to Juliet as “this holy shrine.” Both metaphors are echoed about fifteen years later near the end of Shakespeare’s career when Miranda in The Tempest speaks of Ferdinand in a similar figure of speech.
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Richard III and the Sonnet

“Now is the winter of our discontent” is nearly as familiar as Hamlet’s, “To be, or not to be” and Mark Antony’s, “Friends, Romans, countrymen”. Not one of these three passages is a dramatic dialogue. Mark Antony addresses a large Roman crowd in an extended speech. Hamlet muses to himself in a soliloquy while we the audience listen in.
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Birds — Martial and Marital

In Hamlet (1.1.432), a cock trumpets in the morn, a bird more fitting to the combative nature of Hamlet than the lark that heralds the morn after the first night of marital bliss in Romeo and Juliet (3.5.6).
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Sonnets in Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare, who had begun writing his sonnets sometime in the 1590’s, decided that the form would be useful in Romeo and Juliet. In fact, he wrote four sonnets in the play. The first, spoken by a chorus, opens Act 1. The second appears in Act 1, Scene 5, and it is dialogue spoken by Romeo and Juliet.
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Love and Water

The Comedy of Error’s concluding dialogue between Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse neatly ties up an underlying theme of this farce, that true love — brotherly, marital or other — renders the lovers indistinguishable, “Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother.” But this metaphor of the mirror at the end of the play is a shift from the similes of drops of water that recurred previously.
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Seasons, Elements and Humors

The four seasons, the four elements and the four humors were all related. The four seasons spring, summer, autumn and winter paralleled the four humors blood/sanguine, yellow bile/choleric, phlegm/phlegmatic and black bile/melancholic, which in turn paralleled the four elements air, fire, water and earth. Good health and good disposition of character or personality were believed to be a matter of keeping one’s humors in proper balance.
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How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st

How oft, when thou, my music, music play’stAnastrophe, Antanaclasis, Epizeuxis & Metaphor
Upon that blessèd wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,Anastrophe & Synecdoche
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
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Source Type:

Sonnets

Themes:

Kisses, Music

Figures of Speech:

Anastrophe, Antanaclasis, Catachresis, Ellipsis, Epizeuxis, Hyperbaton, Metaphor, Personification, Synecdoche, Zeugma

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.Synecdoche Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.Polyptoton
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
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Source:

Sonnet 116

Source Type:

Sonnets

Themes:

Constancy, Love

Figures of Speech:

Litotes, Metaphor, Polyptoton, Synecdoche

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Rhetorical Question
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,Metaphor & Hyperbaton
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
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Source:

Sonnet 18

Source Type:

Sonnets

Themes:

Beauty, Summer

Figures of Speech:

Anadiplosis, Anaphora, Antanaclasis, Hyperbaton, Metaphor, Personification, Rhetorical Question

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.Metaphor
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
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Source:

Sonnet 73

Source Type:

Sonnets

Themes:

Old Age

Figures of Speech:

Metaphor

Connected Notes:

Plagiarizing Himself, The Architecture of Sonnet and Song

O, for a muse of fire

O, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!Metaphor
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Anapodoton

Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
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Source:

Henry V

Act 1

Scene Prologue

Line 1

Source Type:

Plays

Spoken by:

Chorus

Themes:

Imagination

Figures of Speech:

Alliteration, Anapodoton, Hyperbaton, Metaphor, Metonymy, Rhetorical Question, Simile

I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina

Leonato, with a letter
I learn in this letter that Don
Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.
Messenger
He is very near by this. He was not three
leagues off when I left him.

He hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age,
doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion.
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Source:

Much Ado About Nothing

Act 1

Scene 1

Line 1

Source Type:

Plays

Spoken by:

Leonato, Messenger

Themes:

False Fronts, Honor, Joy, Leadership, Virtue, Youth

Figures of Speech:

Alliteration, Anapodoton, Anthimeria, Antimetabole, Hyperbaton, Metaphor, Paradox, Personification, Polyptoton, Synecdoche

In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband

Countess
In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.
Bertram
And I in going, madam, weep o’er my father’s
death anew; but I must attend his Majesty’s
command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore
in subjection.

Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead,
excessive grief the enemy to the living

Lafew
You shall find of the King a husband,
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Source:

All's Well That Ends Well

Act 1

Scene 1

Line 1

Source Type:

Plays

Spoken by:

Bertram, Countess of Rossillion, Helen of Rossillion, Lafew

Themes:

Grief, Honesty, Sorrow, Suffering, Virtue

Figures of Speech:

Alliosis, Anaphora, Anapodoton, Ellipsis, Hyperbaton, Isocolon, Metaphor, Personification, Polyptoton, Synecdoche

In sooth I know not why I am so sad

Antonio
In sooth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me, you say it wearies you.
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,Epistrophe
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.
And such a want-wit sadness makes of meHyperbaton
That I have much ado to know myself.
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Source:

Merchant of Venice

Act 1

Scene 1

Line 1

Source Type:

Plays

Spoken by:

Antonio, Salarino

Figures of Speech:

Alliosis, Alliteration, Anaphora, Epistrophe, Hyperbaton, Metaphor, Personification, Simile

Connected Notes:

The Sadness of the Merchant

Noble patricians, patrons of my right, Defend the justice of my cause with arms

Saturninus and his followers at one door, and
Bassianus and his followers at another door, with
other Romans, Drums, and Trumpets.
Saturninus
Noble patricians, patrons of my right,
Defend the justice of my cause with arms.
And countrymen, my loving followers,
Plead my successive title with your swords.
I am his firstborn son that was the last
That wore the imperial diadem of Rome.
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Source:

Titus Andronicus

Act 1

Scene 1

Line 1

Source Type:

Plays

Spoken by:

Bassianus, Captain in Titus, Chiron, Lucius, Saturninus, Tamora, Titus Andronicus

Figures of Speech:

Alliteration, Allusion, Anapodoton, Anastrophe, Ellipsis, Hyperbaton, Metaphor, Oxymoron, Rhetorical Question

Connected Notes:

Lyrical Violence

Now is the winter of our discontent