Extended Metaphors and Conceits
Definitions and Terminology — 0:00:26
Today’s topic is extended metaphors, also called conceits. They’re a device worth loving—a lot of poems that make a real impression rely on them heavily.
To set up terms: an extended metaphor is a metaphor that stretches across multiple lines of a poem, or runs the length of the entire poem. A standard metaphor makes one comparison and moves on; an extended metaphor makes a series of comparisons between the same two things. The same technique works in prose, but poetry is the focus today.
The two parts of a metaphor have names. The tenor is the thing being described. The vehicle is the thing used to describe it. “My love is like a red, red rose”—love is the tenor, rose is the vehicle. These terms aren’t crucial, but they come up.
A conceit is essentially an especially elaborate extended metaphor—particularly long, particularly complicated, or more architecturally central to the poem. There’s no hard line between when something qualifies as a conceit and when it’s just an extended metaphor; the terms are mostly interchangeable. That said, conceit sometimes refers to more structural devices—a golden shovel poem, for instance, where each line ends with successive words borrowed from another poem, has a kind of overarching structural conceit, but it isn’t a metaphor. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin for concept and has nothing to do with vanity—that meaning crept in later as self-conceit (your conception of yourself) gradually came to mean an overinflated one.
Two Classic Examples — 0:03:44
John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” — 0:03:58
A Renaissance-era poem whose speaker is leaving his lover and arguing that physical separation won’t divide them. A brief gold metaphor opens the conceit—two souls, hammered thin like gold leaf, stretch but don’t break—before Donne pivots to the compass:
If they, our souls, be two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two. Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if the other do. And though it in the center sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans and hearkens after it, and grows erect as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me who must, like the other foot, obliquely run. Thy firmness makes my circle just and makes me end where I begun.
The conceit maps each lover onto one leg of a drafting compass. He goes far; she stays fixed at the center. But wherever he roams, he’s orbiting her, and he will always return to where he started—because her steadiness keeps him connected to his place in the world.
Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead” — 0:05:50
A purer example. Gilbert’s wife Michiko has died; the poem is a eulogy.
He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy. First with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder until the blood drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box, and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down.
The poem establishes the metaphor in the first line—grief is like carrying a box that is too heavy—and then spends the rest describing the vehicle. Everything said about carrying the box also applies to the tenor, to grief itself. Gilbert doesn’t need to keep reminding us of that. He set it up at the beginning, and so when we reach the final line—going on without ever putting the box down—we understand both things at once: literally, he’s found a way to keep carrying; and about grief, that it won’t fully go away, only be managed in different ways.
Three Guiding Principles — 0:07:19
First: what you say in the conceit should apply equally to both halves of the metaphor. In the Gilbert poem, everything about carrying the box makes literal sense about carrying a box, and literal sense about grief. If you say something that works metaphorically but doesn’t work literally—”the box made him feel so much sadness”—the reader stumbles, because it only holds on one side. Sometimes poets deliberately say things that only apply to one or the other, but that’s the exception. Usually, you want both halves to hold.
Second: the metaphor should be structural, not decorative. When extended metaphors work well, they’re one of the driving forces of the poem. They’re integral to its logic—how it unfolds, how it makes its argument. Without the conceit, you’d have a different poem. A brief metaphor tossed in for color and then abandoned is an ornament; an extended metaphor is the engine.
Third: the vehicle you choose gives you access to a specific palette of words and images, and it carries implicit claims about the thing you’re describing. This is worth thinking through before you commit. Take two superficially similar options—a breakup described as a car crash versus a plane crash. Both are vehicle crashes, but they open onto entirely different territory.
The car crash gives you road vocabulary: asphalt, lanes, shoulders, swerving, hydroplaning. It implies that both people could be equally at fault; car accidents are ordinary, survivable, something we accept as a daily risk. The plane crash gives you sky, clouds, turbulence, jet streams—a completely different register. Depending on how you set it up, perhaps neither person is at fault (both passengers), or one of you is the pilot. A plane crash is rare, catastrophic, a public spectacle; it’s almost certainly not survivable. There’s no fender-bender version. So the same basic idea—a catastrophic collision—implies very different things about blame, scale, and the prospect of recovery depending on which vehicle you choose. The selection does some of that work; how you present it does the rest. And some implications you can’t fully factor out: there’s no way to describe a car crash without it being a bad thing.
Four Poems in Detail — 0:14:52
Sharon Olds, “My Son, the Man” — 0:14:52
Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider, the way Houdini would expand his body while people were putting him in chains. It seems no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper, guide his calves into the gold interior, zip him up, and toss him up and catch his weight. I cannot imagine him no longer a child, and I know I must get ready. Get over my fear of men, now my son is going to be one. This was not what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson, snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains, and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me the way Houdini studied a box to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
What’s immediately striking is the way it sets up the vehicle in the second line—the son’s shoulders expanding like Houdini inflating against chains—then moves on to things that are weighted more toward the son than Houdini: the sleeper, the zipping, the tossing. But all of it could apply to Houdini in some sense; the images of containment and release echo through. Then the poem seems to abandon the metaphor entirely for the passage about fear of men. And then it returns, surprisingly, at the end: the mother is now the box, the thing he studies for a way out, and then allows to manacle him.
The shift in perspective is the key movement: for most of the poem, the mother is caring for him, worried about her own fears. By the end, she’s seen through his eyes, and she’s the enclosure—the constraint that becomes less necessary as he grows. The metaphor doesn’t run continuously through the poem; it appears, disappears, and comes back transformed.
Alan Shapiro, “Space Dog” — 0:21:29
The context: in the early space race, the Soviet program sent a dog named Laika into orbit with no plan to bring her back. The poem opens with an epigraph—”I did not know that no one was planning to bring me back either”—and a title that announces the metaphor: this is a poem about puberty, and Laika is the vehicle.
Unlike Olds, Shapiro tells us up front what the metaphor is. Then he spends a long passage entirely on the tenor—the adolescent boy marveling in confusion at his own changing body:
As if amazed it’s his, he holds his hand up before the mirror. Hand too big now for the boy’s body… The boy so newly merged with the emerging man, it’s hard to say what’s boy or man but for the eyes. The boyish, rapt confusion in the look he looks with at his mobile fingers… Shadow of hair, in armpit, crotch, voice deeper than it was, then higher, deeper, while the eyes, astounded, furtive, are the eyes of someone who cannot quite wake up from the dream in which he suddenly discovers he is naked among a crowd of strangers.
Along the way, the poem tries and discards several minor metaphors—the fist like an exotic flower, the dream of being naked among strangers—that do their work for a line and are released. Then it pivots to the extended metaphor: the dog’s eyes in an old drawing, not yet distrusting, but no longer trusting, fixed on black space like a door the masters have walked through and will return from. Surely they’ll come to get me. Surely they didn’t love me all that time for this.
The approach is a gamble. Spending all that time on the tenor without touching the vehicle risks losing the reader’s connection to the title. But because Shapiro established the metaphor upfront and it’s the only one he commits to—staying with it when he discards everything else—it gets special weight. The em-dash that pivots from the boy’s eyes to Laika’s eyes is also the first time an “I” appears in the poem, suggesting the boy is a younger version of the speaker, and the speaker’s adult knowledge—no one was coming to get me—is coloring this childhood memory even if the boy didn’t feel it that way at the time.
The poem generated some disagreement. One participant found the vehicle overshadowing the tenor—the pathos of the dog in orbit is more vividly imagined than the stated subject of puberty, and some felt the metaphor implied a kind of blame (someone sent the dog; no one caused puberty). The defense: the dog doesn’t necessarily blame the masters. It’s bewilderment, not accusation. Whether that transfers depends partly on how traumatic you found adolescence. Maybe the reaction varies by reader more than by whether the poem succeeds.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Underwater Behind Glass” — 0:42:50
An interesting case: an extended metaphor where both things are literally happening within the universe of the poem. The speaker and her first love wander a National Aquarium together after five years apart. As they read a display about lobsters walking hundreds of miles to find their single mate, both characters become aware that they’re thinking the same thing—whether all this time and distance has been their journey to find their way back to each other. And the speaker explicitly steps back from it: this is too easy. Right now, we are too much in wonder.
So the poem sets up a conceit and then rejects it in real time, the speaker catching herself making the metaphor and deciding to stay with the literal experience instead. Then the poem ends with a strange fish fact: the flounder’s eye migrates across its head as it grows, leaving one side blind. Is that a metaphor too? We don’t know. The poem has put us in a state where the literal and the metaphorical are blurred, and we can’t easily tell which mode we’re in.
Robert Hass, “Heroic Simile” — 0:45:56
The opposite approach: the poem is almost entirely metaphor, and we don’t realize it until the end. It opens with a swordsman falling in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, falling like a pine tree—and then the simile expands into a fantasy scene of woodsmen sawing up this enormous tree, an entire elaborate imagining that has nothing to do with the actual film:
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” in the gray rain, in the CinemaScope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine. He fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls, and the tree was so huge, the woodsmen returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing, and on the third day, he brought his uncle…
The poem tracks the woodsmen’s calculations and anxieties for several stanzas—rich imaginative detail with no close analog in the film. And then, at the very end: A man and woman walk home from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.
The whole elaborate conceit collapses into that line. The speaker and a woman he lives with—married, or something like it—are walking home in silence, not quite together. He can imagine this entire world, but he cannot imagine a way out of the loneliness inside the relationship. There are limits to imagination. The poem makes the metaphor become a metaphor only at the very end, when we suddenly understand what all of it has been about.
One participant noted that poetry doesn’t make arguments the way a legal brief does—it proceeds obliquely, through association and image rather than linear steps. The Hass poem is a good example: the experience of watching the film, something about fidelity and loss in it, moves through his imagination into this fantasy that has nothing to do with the film, which turns out to be entirely about his life. The path is slant. The argument arrives sideways.
On Breaking the Metaphor — 0:40:10
A question that came up: what happens when a poet uses an extended metaphor but also slips in unrelated one-off metaphors? Is that a problem?
It depends on how deliberately it’s done. If you’ve built up a central metaphor and then suddenly break from it for a single line, that will be a noticeable rupture. That rupture may be exactly what you want—but if it isn’t, it will feel jarring, like it breaks the spell. The trade-off is always: what do I gain from this shift versus what I risk losing by interrupting the logic I’ve been building? If the poem is working partly because the reader has been absorbed in one frame of reference, interrupting that frame costs something.
The “Space Dog” and “Heroic Simile” examples both deviate from their central metaphors deliberately and for effect. But they’re not quite the same as having a stray metaphor embedded in the middle of something else. The former is a large-scale structural choice; the latter is more of a local confusion.
Extended metaphors also lend themselves to deep analysis precisely because so much is built into any metaphor you choose—its vocabulary, its implications, its cultural weight. That richness is part of what makes them worth spending time with.
The Lecturer’s Own Poem — 0:52:16
Closing with a poem of his own, written about a decade ago, prompted by a Magritte painting—Les Amants—depicting two lovers trying to kiss through sackcloth hoods over their heads:
Nothing will be all right, but thank you anyway. Want wants what it wants. In Magritte’s “Les Amants,” two lovers, their separate heads in sackcloth shrouds, press together the spaces where their lips would be. Under the sacks, they can’t have air enough, wrapped in darkness and their own stale breathing. But we want so much to believe they’re happy despite it all. Though they’ll never truly touch or see past the tips of their own noses. Though at the wedding, she’ll remove her bridal veil only to reveal the familiar veil. Though they’ll get a house and raise children whose lives they’ll infer from muffled sounds. Children who’ll cry and teethe and grow old from behind their own thick shrouds. Maybe still they’re happy. Or at least, maybe they could be. We can’t know, after all, that they aren’t content. Maybe never knowing how your lover looks at you is mercy, and they’ll never have to pay for sunglasses. The sacks might smell richly of sandalwood and cinnamon.
The book this comes from centers on a rocky relationship dragging out its death throes. The painting was the trigger—an image of connection that is also complete separation. What began as a one-off metaphor kept expanding the more time was spent thinking about it literally: the impracticality of living like this, the absurdity of it, all those things that couldn’t be done. In the same way the two characters in the situation were torturing themselves, the poem tortures the metaphor, carrying it way past the point of necessity.
What the metaphor gave was a way to mix genuine pain with awareness of the absurdity—to hold both at once. The consolation at the end, that the sacks might smell richly of sandalwood and cinnamon, is meant to feel obviously false—and even the character knows it. It’s the hollow bon courage, the cheer-up that doesn’t cheer anyone up. The title appears only there, which means for a standalone reader, the metaphorical dimension of the poem is only visible in that one place—within a collection, you’d have context, but alone it’s almost entirely literal, and that’s intentional.
A Note on Extended Metaphors as Practice — 1:01:22
Extended metaphors offer a practical gift: once you have one you’re happy with, it becomes the driving logic of the poem, and you can follow it rather than invent from scratch at every line. A former professor, talking about his book Night of the Republic—poems set in places you don’t usually visit at night, shoe stores and gas station bathrooms—described the structural conceit as productive low-hanging fruit: I just think of a place, then think of it at night, and I’ve got a poem. Extended metaphors can do something similar at the smaller scale. Once the frame is set, you just follow the next logical (or illogical) step of the metaphor and see where it goes. It can take away some of the now what? that stalls a poem midway through.
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