Poetry Terms: Metaphor ♥

DEFINITION 
Compare two things without using connecting words.

EXAMPLE

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
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,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

SIGNIFICANCE

It's important to compare things in a poem because if a poem only focuses on one thing it will be boring. When you compare things, you can compare something small to something significant and abstract. You can also compare big things to small things that are more connected and close to people so they can understand what you mean easily. Metaphor doensn't use connecting words and it's a pretty good choice because it makes it a little bit more complicated to guess what the author means. That will give us different answers and interpretations which will be really interesting.