Tropes--In classical rhetoric, a figure of speech involving a "turn" or change of sense--the use of a word in a sense other than its literal one--figures of comparison (metaphor, simile) as well as ironical expressions.
We organize according to resemblances. Our need to compare is psychological and emotional. Poets try not only to relate to what is familiar, but they try to discover resemblances that no one had noticed before. It's true, we feel, when coming on a good comparison, It's true, but I never realized it!
Poets express discoveries of likenesses through figures of speech like simile and metaphor. Some people think figures of speech are unnatural but language itself is nothing but a figure of speech We use a word when we mean a thing.
Simile is Latin word for "like." Metaphor is from the Greek word for "transfer"; in using it we transfer to one thing the name of something else we associate with it, as when we say "the heart of a cruel man is a stone" or that "a grumpy man is a bear."
Often when we speak in metaphor we are thinking in simile: That boxer is a bull in the ring. No question of a real bull.
Metaphor, since unqualified, is usually stronger than simile. More concentrated, hits with greater impact.
When we say A is like B or A is B we are trying to show in a fresh and vivid way something about the nature of A. A good figure often jolts, surprises into a pleasant shock of recognition.
When John Clare writes:
In gentle waves the river heaveswe may feel that the floating leaves are so much like little boats that the point is hardly worth expressing. Also, with Lowell's:
That sways like boats the lily-leaves...
A seal swims like a poodle through the sheet of blinding salt...The head of a seal may seem too much like a poodle. Brewster Ghislin is being bolder, eerier:
Slant of their fins asway like a wing speedingOn the other hand the two things compared may be so far apart that we fail to see the point. Nothing is easier than to be "original" in one's metaphors. The trick is to be original and true to experience. One can say anything is like anything. There are no two things in the world, said Cicero, that cannot be compared.
And heads rising blunt like a feeding swallow's
They circle. . . .
When a writer is using an A is like B formula to make a comparison and either element distorts the other, or contradicts the other, he might haveforced a mixed metaphor. If you say, "People who skate on thin ice are likely to find themselves in hot water," you mix metaphors.
Mixed metaphors are like double exposures in photography. Some may be deliberate, some may be accidentally good. Most are plain failures, with comic results, ugly or blurred.
Images are not felt as mixed when the poet makes a clean break with one before going on to another. Robert Burns's poem:
O my love's like a red, red roseIf he'd said "My love is like a red, red rose that sings a merry tune," we might have resisted justifiably.
That's newly sprung in June;
O my love's like the melody
That's sweetly played in tune.
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