Blogger #7, Bang En Lee, Period 6, 11/16/2020, Day B

 Blogger #7, Bang En Lee, Period 6, 11/16/2020, Day B

Aim: How are metaphors used by writers to send meaning to readers?

Do now: For our do now, we had to fill in the blank to complete a metaphor. The metaphor we had to fill in was “Love is                  .” I filled the blank with the word war. Others wrote that “Love is like a lottery”(Thomas Li), “Love is a game of push and pull”(Niki Lam), and “Love is immaculate”(Anna Vachadze)

Soon we watched the video Red Room Poetry Object Poetic Device #3: Metaphor [2:14]

It gave us an overview of metaphors by using many of them themselves. Not soon after, we had to remember a new definition for a phrase: Extended Metaphor. The meaning of the phrase is a metaphor that is developed over several lines or a poem. Famous examples of extended metaphors include “The road not taken” by Robert Frost and Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son”.

We read an article from The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST  “Poetry for Everyday Life” APRIL 11, 2011 By David Brooks. It explains our many uses of metaphors and how we use them in our everyday lives. He explains that we use metaphors in our everyday lives to express concepts that we couldn’t fully comprehend. He shows us the many examples of metaphors that have been used throughout our lives.

After reading the article, we were asked to read and discuss the poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” (Emily Dickinson). We had to discuss how she used the extended metaphor about hope to express the theme of the poem. We said that the theme was Hope is something that is never extinguished no matter how small. She expressed this theme by comparing hope to a small bird that can never back down from a storm no matter how little we give it.

After discussing the poem, we did group work to discuss the poems “Mother to Son”(Langston Hughes) and “The Rose that Grew from Concrete” by Tupac Shakur. From both poems, they utilize an extended metaphor to express the theme of their poem. In Langston Hughes’ poem, the main theme that came from the extended metaphor was to never forget that life is never easy and that one should try hard to overcome them. In Tupac Shakur’s poem, the main theme is to overcome hardship to reach your final goal. Both poems show a similar theme because they ask for determination and strength to overcome all adversity. 

Reflection: Everyday in our life, we use metaphors to describe the many things we see in our world. It creates comparisons to show things that we don’t understand. Its alternate version, the extended metaphor, shows us a description over multiple sentences. Whether it is in newspapers to the best Shakespearean quote we can think of, it is full of it. Metaphors are a common usage in our world of literature. If we don’t understand it, we will not be able to comprehend the many things our world has yet to offer. The same would go to its other version, the extended metaphor. It is used in lots of texts. Without understanding it, we cannot fully understand the beauty of the literature we read.