Definition:
The underlying idea or principal subject that is the meaning of a metaphor. See also:
Etymology:
Coined by I.A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).Examples and Observations:
- In the first stanza of Abraham Cowley's poem “The Wish,” the tenor is the city and the vehicle is a beehive:
WELL then! I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne'er agree.
The very honey of all earthly joy
Does of all meats the soonest cloy;
And they, methinks, deserve my pity
Who for it can endure the stings,
The crowd and buzz and murmurings,
Of this great hive, the city.
(Abraham Cowley, "The Wish") - In William Stafford's poem "Recoil," the first stanza is the vehicle and the second stanza is the tenor:
The bow bent remembers home long,
the years of its tree, the whine
of wind all night conditioning
it, and its answer--Twang!
"To the people here who would fret me down
their way and make me bend:
By remembering hard I could startle for home
and be myself again." - "[I.A. Richards] understood metaphor as a series of shifts, as borrowings back and forth, between tenor and vehicle. Hence, in 1936, his famous definition of metaphor as a 'transaction between contexts.'
"Richards justified coining tenor, vehicle, and ground to clarify the terms of that transaction. . . . The two parts had been called by such loaded locutions as 'the original idea' and 'the borrowed one'; 'what is really being said or thought of' and 'what it is compared to'; 'the idea' and 'the image'; and 'the meaning' and 'the metaphor.' Some theorists refused to concede how much idea was imbedded in, drawn from the image. . . . With neutral terms a critic can proceed to study the relations between tenor and vehicle more objectively."
(J. P. Russo, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work. Taylor, 1989)
Pronunciation: TEN-er
