Metaphor

The detective listened to her tales with a wooden face.

She was fairly certain that life was a fashion show.

The typical teenage boy’s room is a disaster area.

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep.

The children were roses grown in concrete gardens, beautiful and forlorn.

Kisses are the flowers of love in bloom.

His cotton candy words did not appeal to her taste.

Kathy arrived at the grocery store with an army of children.

Her eyes were fireflies.

He wanted to set sail on the ocean of love but he just wasted away in the desert.

I was lost in a sea of nameless faces.

John’s answer to the problem was just a Band-Aid, not a solution.

The cast on Michael’s broken leg was a plaster shackle.

Cameron always had a taste for the fruit of knowledge.

The promise between us was a delicate flower.

He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone.

He pleaded for her forgiveness but Janet’s heart was cold iron.

She was just a trophy to Ricardo, another object to possess.

The path of resentment is easier to travel than the road to forgiveness.

Katie’s plan to get into college was a house of cards on a crooked table.

The wheels of justice turn slowly.

Hope shines–a pebble in the gloom.

She cut him down with her words.

The job interview was a rope ladder dropped from heaven.

Her hair was a flowing golden river streaming down her shoulders.

The computer in the classroom was an old dinosaur.

Laughter is the music of the soul.

David is a worm for what he did to Shelia.

The teacher planted the seeds of wisdom.

Phyllis, ah, Phyllis, my life is a gray day

Each blade of grass was a tiny bayonet pointed firmly at our bare feet.

The daggers of heat pierced through his black t-shirt.

Let your eyes drink up that milkshake sky.

The drums of time have rolled and ceased.

Her hope was a fragile seed.

When Ninja Robot Squad came on TV, the boys were glued in their seats.

Words are the weapons with which we wound.

She let such beautiful pearls of wisdom slip from her mouth without even knowing.

Scars are the roadmap to the soul.

The quarterback was throwing nothing but rockets and bombs in the field.

We are all shadows on the wall of time.

My heart swelled with a sea of tears.

When the teacher leaves her litte realm, she breaks her wand of power apart.

The Moo Cow’s tail is a piece of rope all raveled out where it grows.

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee.

The clouds sailed across the sky.

Each flame of the fire is a precious stone belonging to all who gaze upon it.

And therefore I went forth with hope and fear into the wintry forest of our life.

My words are chains of lead.

But into her face there came a flame; / I wonder could she have been thinking the same?

Metaphor Examples for Advanced Readers

Here are fifty more challenging examples of metaphors. The slashes indicate line breaks.

The light flows into the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.

Men court not death when there are sweets still left in life to taste.

In capitalism, money is the life blood of society but charity is the soul.

Whose world is but the trembling of a flare, / And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

Fame is the fragrance of heroic deeds, / Of flowers of chivalry and not of weeds!

So I sit spinning still, round this decaying form, the fine threads of rare and subtle thought.

And swish of rope and ring of chain /

Are music to men who sail the main.

Still sits the school-house by the road, a ragged beggar sunning.

The child was our lone prayer to an empty sky.

Blind fools of fate and slaves of circumstance, / Life is a fiddler, and we all must dance.

Grind the gentle spirit of our meek reviews into a powdery foam of salt abuse.

Laugh a drink from the deep blue cup of sky.

Think now: history has many cunning passages and contrived corridors.

You are now in London, that great sea whose ebb and flow at once is deaf and loud,

His fine wit makes such a wound that the knife is lost in it.

Waves of spam emails inundated his inbox.

In my heart’s temple I suspend to thee these votive wreaths of withered memory.

He cast a net of words in garish colours wrought to catch the idle buzzers of the day.

This job is the cancer of my dreams and aspirations.

This song shall be thy rose, soft, fragrant, and with no thorn left to wound thy bosom.

There, one whose voice was venomed melody.

A sweetness seems to last amid the dregs of past sorrows.

So in this dimmer room which we call life,

Life is the night with its dream-visions teeming, / Death is the waking at day.

Then the lips relax their tension

and the pipe begins to slide, /

Till in little clouds of ashes,

it falls softly at his side.

The olden days: when thy smile to me was wine, golden wine thy word of praise.

Thy tones are silver melted into sound.

Under us the brown earth / Ancient and strong, / The best bed for wanderers;

Love is a guest that comes, unbidden, / But, having come, asserts his right;

My House of Life is weather-stained with years.

See the sun, far off, a shrivelled orange in a sky gone black;

Three pines strained darkly, runners in a race unseen by any.

But the rare herb, Forgetfulness, it hides away from me.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman

Life: a lighted window and a closed door.

Some days my thoughts are just cocoons hanging from dripping branches in the grey woods of my mind.

Men and women pass in the street glad of the shining sapphire weather.

The swan existing is a song with an accompaniment.

At night the lake is a wide silence, without imagination.

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume.

The great gold apples of light hang from the street’s long bough, dripping their light on the faces that drift below, on the faces that drift and blow.

From its blue vase the rose of evening drops.

When in the mines of dark and silent thought / Sometimes I delve and find strange fancies there,

The twigs were set beneath a veil of willows.

He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail, / Thinking that comfort was a fairy tale,

O Moon, your light is failing and you are nothing now but a bow.

Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, / A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.

This world of life is a garden ravaged.

And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear / Into the wintry forest of our life;

My soul was a lampless sea and she was the tempest.

Metaphor: Situation vs. the Real Thing

You may have often heard expressions such as “he drowned in a sea of grief” or “she is fishing in troubled waters,” or “success is a bastard as it has many fathers, and failure is an orphan, with no takers.” All these expressions have one thing in common: a situation is compared to a real thing, although the situation is not actually that particular thing.

· Sea of grief - How and where does one come across a sea that is filled not with water, but with grief?

· Fishing - It is not used to mean that the person is actually fishing; it is an expression which is used to signify that the person is looking for something that is difficult to obtain.

· Success is a sense of achievement, it is not an illegitimate child! - The saying is used to reinforce the age-old belief that everyone wants to take credit for something that became a success, either by fluke or by conscious effort. On the other hand, no matter how much effort or creativity may have gone into an enterprise, the moment it is considered a failure, no one wants to take responsibility for it, much like an abandoned infant.

· Broken heart - Your heart is not literally broken into pieces; you just feel hurt and sad.

· The light of my life - The person described by this metaphor isn't really providing physical light. He or she is just someone who brings happiness or joy.

· It's raining men - Men do not literally pour from the sky; there are simply an abundance of male suitors around at the time.

· Time is a thief - Time isn't really stealing anything, this metaphor just indicates that time passes quickly and our lives pass us by.

· He is the apple of my eye - There is, of course, no real apple in a person's eye. The "apple" is someone beloved and held dear.

· Bubbly personality - A bubbly personality doesn't mean a person is bubbling over with anything, just that the person is cheerful.

· Feel blue - No one actually ever feels like the color blue, although many people say they are "feeling blue" to mean they are feeling sad.

· Fade off to sleep - You don't actually fade, you simply go to sleep.

· Inflamed your temper - The news inflamed your temper is not a situation where there is any actual fire or flames, it is just a situation where someone gets mad.

· Reeks of infidelty - When said about a cheating partner, this doesn't actually mean that there is a literal smell. Instead, it is just apparent that the person is cheating.

· Rollercoaster of emotions - A rollercoaster of emotions doesn't exist anywhere, so when people are on a rollercoaster of emotions, they are simply experiencing lots of ups and downs.

· Stench of failure - The stench of failure is strong, according to the common metaphor, but of course failing doesn't really smell.

All of these expressions are examples of metaphors which are also similies. They are juxtaposing an actual (literal) thing and a figurative thing in order to give more meaning to the figurative concept. To use the above examples, the literal expression in the phrase is “sea,” while “grief” is the figurative item.

An example of a metaphor that is an analogy would be so say "The house looked like it was designed in the 1940s."