extended metaphor

A comparison between two unlike things that continues throughout a series of sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem.

See also:

• Metaphor
• Allegory
• Conceit
• Susan Orlean's Extended Metaphor: "Super-Duper"
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Metaphor
• What Is a Metaphor?

Examples and Observations:

• Emily Dickinson's Extended Metaphor: Hope as a "Little Bird"
  
  "Hope is the thing with feathers
  That perches in the soul,
  And sings the tune--without the words,
  And never stops at all,
  
  "And sweetest in the gale is heard;
  And sore must be the storm
  That could abash the little bird
  That kept so many warm.
  
  "I've heard it in the chillest land,
  And on the strangest sea;
  Yet, never, in extremity,
  It asked a crumb of me."
  (Emily Dickinson)



• Will Ferrell's Extended Metaphor: The University of Life
  "I graduated from the University of Life. All right? I received a degree from the School of Hard Knocks. And our colors were black and blue, baby. I had office hours with the Dean of Bloody Noses. All right? I borrowed my class notes from Professor Knuckle Sandwich and his Teaching Assistant, Ms. Fat Lip Thon Nyun. That’s the kind of school I went to for real, okay?"
  (Will Ferrell, Commencement Address at Harvard University, 2003)



• "Bobby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus. Currently I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cartwheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down."
  (Dean Koontz, Seize the Night. Bantam, 1999)



• Allegory and Extended Metaphor
  "Allegory is often described as extended metaphor, but the description is only acceptable if 'extended' refers to the linguistic expression while 'metaphor' refers to the conceptual structure. Crisp (2005: 124-125), for instance, claims that 'Extended metaphor . . . is different from allegory because it contains language that relates directly to both the source and target.' Allegory, by contrast, typically only has language which evokes what may be seen as the elaborated source domain."
  (Gerard Steen, Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A Methodological Analysis of Theory and Research. John Benjamins, 2007)



• "'Extended metaphor' can thus be defined as literary (as opposed to ordinary-language) metaphors that are consciously (as opposed to out of necessity) sustained throughout a text or discourse (as opposed to isolated use). Werth (1994: 84) contends that this type of metaphor is an exclusive property of literary texts. He also has a footnote that draws attention to the use of sustained metaphor in advertising."
  (Ingrid Piller, "Extended Metaphor in Automobile Fan Discourse." Poetics Today, Autumn 1999)



• "It's at moments like these in a game [of squash] that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid--and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect."
  (Ian McEwan, Saturday, 2005)