Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world. ― Robert Frost

Disclaimer: In school, most of us had to memorize the difference between a metaphor and simile, and we’re painfully aware of the differences. For the purposes of this post, however, I’m using metaphor generously to include all comparisons–even those that use like or as (Please forgive me, Miss Gilpin!)

Consider metaphor’s elixir in matters of the heart. I recall a story my dad once told me about a high school basketball player he coached and taught. He noticed that this young man was habitually hanging out at the locker of a particularly pretty coed. When he asked him about his prospects with this young woman, the young man shook his head dejectedly and admitted that he’d repeatedly struck out in his requests for a date. My dad said, I’m going to suggest something–now hear me out. Open the literature anthology we use in class (the book, my dad admitted, he’d never seen the student open), choose a poem you like, copy it, and give it to her. The student didn’t say aloud, Are you crazy? but his face said it all. Still, the next day during English class, my dad saw the student crack open the book, thumb through the pages, rip out a piece of notebook paper, and urgently copy from the page. Then he folded the paper into the smallest square possible, and sent the note on its way through eager hands all the way to the front row where the young woman sat. Seconds ticked by as she unfolded the note and read its contents. Then she whipped around in her seat so violently that she almost threw herself out onto the floor. She looked back to the young man with utter adoration. A date was surely in the works, my dad thought. Later, he asked the student what he’d copied from the text. Something about her being like a summer’s day, he said. Something like that. He’d copied Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18 which begins: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate. He chose a good one, my dad told me, a very good one. And he confessed that he signed the poem with his own name. Lucky for him, the young woman didn’t know her Shakespeare! Ah, the power of metaphor to bring two star-crossed lovers (or at least two ill-read high school students) together!

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. This metaphor comes to us compliments of John Updike in his novel, Rabbit, Run. And what a metaphor it is! Their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. Wait–what? A leaping starfish? Realists may scoff and question the whole comparison, arguing that anyone knows starfish can’t leap. But poet Jane Hirshfield argues that [m]etaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind. Leaping starfish may not sit right in our logical minds, but they live gloriously in our imaginations. And often in our memories. Thanks to John Updike whose metaphor I’ve come to love, I can’t look at a pair of locked hands without seeing them as starfish leaping through the dark.

One who truly understands the power and worth of metaphor, Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa writes:

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.

Take for instance, biblical metaphors, which bring the spiritual world of the divine into the physical world of the ordinary:

We are the clay, and You our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand. —Isaiah 64:8

I am the good shepherd, … and I lay down my life for the sheep. —John 10:14-15

I am the vine; you are the branches. —John 15:5

These metaphors live vividly, indeed, and take on their own personalities: God as potter, shepherd, and vine, and humans as clay, sheep, and branches. Or consider the infamous words of Elvis Presley: You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog / Cryin’ all the time. Or the timeless lyrics of Rascall Flatts: Life is a highway / I wanna ride it all night long. Singer-songwriters depend upon metaphors to live vividly and take on their own personalities, to console and enlighten us.

We use metaphor confidently in common speech. When we say that he’s a late bloomer or she’s a real thorn in my side, we do so with complete confidence that those listening will understand. When I tutored non-native English speakers, I became painfully aware of just how often we use such metaphors. The teacher is a bear? one Japanese student said with horror in his eyes. No, I reassured him, not literally a bear. Then I set out to deconstruct the metaphor for him, in hopes that he’d go to class the next day without fear of being mauled or eaten.

And what about bad metaphors, the kind that are so bad that they’re good? Here’s some of my favorites from actual student (not mine!) papers:

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling-Free.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. (Wait–isn’t this one of those overly complicated math story problems?)

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

How I love a good, bad metaphor? They’re much like bad jokes. You wait for the punch line, and when it comes, it’s delightfully awful. As one of my former students so convincingly argued: You have to at least give me credit for effort. Clearly, there’s effort behind these bad metaphors, for it obviously took some thought to settle on a comparison of a warm laugh to a vomiting dog.

In Alvin Journeyman, Orson Scott Card writes: Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. I learned this lesson early and well from my father who claimed that [n]othing enriches our wooden lives like metaphor. And he could pack a whole lot of truth in very little space, presenting an exquisitely lean metaphor to carry some downright heavy wisdom:

Don’t think that a small vessel like a poem can’t be a freighter.

Gossip is a form of skinning.

Revelations are like stones dropped into the palm of a blind man.

A breeze is the tenderest habit skin can wear.

Speed reading is like trying to kiss a girl who’s driving by in a convertible. All you get is a hint of her pucker.

In bureaucracies sour cream rises to the top, followed by foam.

Marriage, like the sun, should be the longest form of love.

Those who feast upon memories occasionally eat the best left-overs.

Both Robert Frost and my father were right about metaphor. We must be educated in it if we are to live beyond our wooden lives.