Summary
The aim reads as follows:
"How are metaphors used by writers to send meaning to readers?"
The Do Now consisted of describing the concept of love. The students came up with humorous responses, such as "What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more," or "Love is dead." Other responses were thoughtful, like "Love is pain and sacrifice," and "Love is like a four-leaf clover."
We were then shown that our many descriptions of love were examples of an extended metaphor.
A metaphor uses variations of the phrase "to be," such as is, am, are, was, having, had, must, etc. In comparison to a simile, a metaphor is a distinct implicit comparison of one idea to another.
This video helped to simplify the concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4gMKZKU3lE&ab_channel=TheRedRoomCompany
As did this image:
(Our teacher also told us that she created a song to memorize the words that indicate metaphors, which I thought was very creative of her.)
That covered the general idea of a metaphor, but now we were getting into the flesh and bones of real extended metaphors. Many classic writings have extended metaphors, like Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, Langston Hughes’ Mother to Son.
Next, the class spirit read a text called Poetry for Everyday Life, which showed examples of different metaphors in text.
Here's the link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/opinion/12brooks.html
Afterward, now turning to Class Discussion, the class read a poem called Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson. It depicted hope as a bird, generous and tenacious, facing many hardships and never giving up. The class came to the consensus that the author used an extended metaphor to express a theme of courage and perseverance.
“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 chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
Now the classes were broken into teams, where we read the poems Mother To Son by Langston Hughes (a poem of a mother telling her son about climbing stairs with splinters rather than crystal stairs) and The Rose that Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur (a poem that tells the story of a pitiful rose that grew, despite being shunned from the world). When asked to show what the extended metaphors were, the answers were as follows:
"The rose, usually an elegant flower, is seen as growing from a low-class material like concrete. This shows how the author describes a successful person gradually thriving out of poverty."
"The final stanza indicates that the mother had a really rough life but she kept fighting, “kept climbing,” and persevering."
Finally, as a team, we compared the two poems and their extended metaphors. We concluded that both poems exhibit overcoming hardships in different ways to display a common theme of perseverance.
Reflection
Today overall, we learned about extended metaphors and how they're utilized in poetry. Extended metaphors are used to depict emotions, environment, and other abstract concepts through objects, predicaments, and materials. They're much different and much more versatile than similes, as they use the phrase to be rather than as or like. They can also be applied to many things and people.
We learned this because, well, we're in the middle of a poetry lesson. However, if you're talking non-literally, we learned about extended metaphors because they're important features in poetry altogether. Many writers use extended metaphors to convey ideas, and so it'll be efficient to learn about it and know how to recognize them when they come up in texts.
We can use what we've learned to broaden our writing abilities and recognize more advanced techniques in other forms of writing. With this new knowledge of knowing how to break down extended metaphors to find the meaning, we can use this when we write our own poetry to be better poets in general.
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