On Writing Metaphor

When you think about the literary devices that build into great poetry, “metaphors” are often the first to come to mind. A metaphor allows us to see the world in ways both new and strange; they quite literally shift our perspectives and shape the ways we think. Poets know this better than anyone—but how do you write them well? 

Let’s take the plunge into the beauty and complexity of rich metaphors, and how you can hone them in your own work. 

Close Study: “Outbreaks” by Kitchen McKeown

i search for god but the sun is a penny.
looper moths form halos beneath the streetlamps.
summer’s ghostly curtains. check the weather.
haze. i search for god but the moon is gone.
i search for comfort, and the eels come.
they cross my meadow every twilight,
up to seven feet in length, traversing
mountain napes with open eager mouths.
the fires heaved them from the rivers,
now they curve themselves across
the precipice of life, toward black oceans.
haunted yellow eyes. looper moths
become a gentle cloud. i become an eel,
then rethink it. i cough. reveal a wet moth.
some gray little heart. it’s all hazy now.
pale as sunbleached wood, i go forth.
in a slant of moonlight, i search for comfort.
the neon 24-hour fried chicken sign
gleams behind the pines.
i crawl in the moss. it is easy to find god.
she is a cluster of eels beneath my palms.
i ask of her, am i doing any of this life right?
and she, with her many mouths,
says nothing.

This gorgeous, kaleidoscopic poem resists easy interpretation, which is all the more reason to look at it closely. I love the sense of endless transformation and searching that prompts this piece forward, the sense of smallness and mundanity reinterpreted by metaphor, and the overabundance of the spiritual in the ordinary. Great poetry often arrives at something “bigger-than-us”—lets examine how Kitchen McKeown is able to do this in “Outbreaks.”

In a great poem, each line builds upon a certain kind of tension that prompts the poem’s existence. In this poem, the speaker’s identity is constantly being transformed by metaphor, and through this transformation, the speaker searches for “god,” almost as though god is a hole that cannot be filled.

Let’s first look at the nature of identity in this poem. The speaker has an ever-shifting sense of self—which is skillfully represented in the poem’s use of a lowercase “i”. The central comparison is the speaker to that of an eel, which comes after the speaker admires the eel’s size and history: the eels that visit the speaker are seven feet in length, have arrived from long distances, and curve around “the precipice of life.” (What do the eels represent? More on that later.) The speaker, after this, becomes an eel, “then rethink[s] it”—only to become the kind of thing that coughs wet moths, with skin as pale as sunbleached wood. There’s a lot of beautiful, interesting imagery here, though it’s hard to understand exactly what’s happening.

This brings us to the poem’s search for lowercase-g god, which constantly eludes the speaker, much like their identity does as well. The opening line establishes this dynamic: “i search for god but the sun is a penny.” The “but” makes god’s elusive nature obvious, but what does it mean that the sun is a penny? It’s almost as though the speaker is minimizing or cheapening what’s sacred or untouchable. Perhaps the sun was a guidepost for finding god, and now that guidepost no longer exists. Then: i search for god but “the moon is gone”. Then: “i search for comfort”; the eels come; the moon, another beacon of god, disappears, though the speaker still searches for comfort “in slant of moonlight.” (And don’t forget the moths, which were once a soul-like halo, then a cloud, then something the speaker coughs.)

These transformations are both chaser and chased. The speaker transforms towards god, and god transforms away. It appears that, in the search for comfort, the speaker stumbles upon god, an accident, perhaps because of the comfort the eels bring.

So, there are two transformations going on here: transformation of self, and transformation of the search for god/comfort. At the center of this is the eel-related imagery. Why eels? They’re not exactly comforting to look at. Personally, whenever I see potentially-electric river snakes sliming around with their gaping mouths, I think, among other things, “this is not comforting to look at.” There’s a certain irony to this particular image, but the eels also feel relevant to this search for god and self, which constantly loops and folds and twists and curves like eels’ bodies do. The eels themselves feel like agents of god: angels, in a way, or else guideposts towards what the speaker is looking for. Imbued with a certain strange holiness, these eels cluster beneath the speaker’s palm to become god, which results in this wonderful final movement:

i crawl in the moss. it is easy to find god.
she is a cluster of eels beneath my palms.
i ask of her, am i doing any of this life right?
and she, with her many mouths,
says nothing.

It is as though the poem has been orbiting an empty center, then crash landed into that center, only to find more nothingness. As though god is an asymptote, something to aspire towards yet never reach, something that will present itself when you’re not looking for it, and never in the form you expect. This is how every image and metaphor seems to operate in the poem, whether god comes in the form of eels, or comfort comes in the form of neon signs and pines (some lovely, ironic juxtaposition here as well).

What I’m left with, after reading this poem about a thousand times, is a sense of wonder at the mysterious workings of the spiritual. I appreciate the secular nature of this poem, how its attempts to find god feel applicable to anyone’s creed (or lack thereof), and I also appreciate how the poem’s driving tension is the gravitational pull of both god and selfhood, two strange and asymptotic forces that always leave us wanting more. Finally, I love this poem’s strange and fantastic metaphors, rich with interpretation and awe, letting the speaker shapeshift their way towards that beautiful and catastrophic plummet into the untouchable center of identity and higher powers; an asteroid plummeting, perhaps, into itself.

Craft Perspective: “Creating Persuasive Metaphors” by M. C. Benner Dixon

Read it here, in LitHub.

I love this essay’s careful attention to words and names, because I love the idea that words themselves are metaphors for what they represent. I won’t get into a philosophical inquiry on semiotics (at least, not in this newsletter), but the idea that “tree” is a metaphor for a tree itself delights me in essay-length ways.

As Benner Dixon notes, metaphors are foundational to our thinking. They don’t just influence the ways we think, they quite literally shape the ways we navigate our world. An example Benner Dixon gives is that we often compare an argument to a war. As a result, we become concerned with who “won” the debate, who was the victor—and not, as a possible alternative, how we might have been mutually improved by having a conversation about our different viewpoints. Here’s another example: when someone is upset, we sometimes say they got “bent out of shape,” which has always struck me as a way of minimizing someone’s feelings, as we are less likely to listen with patience and compassion if we think that person is “bent.”

So, we are clearly moved by metaphors, especially when we don’t pause to think about what they mean. Poetry implores us to slow down, to think through language and how it moves through us, and to depict the world in ways that are accurate and meaningful. Often, when our metaphors achieve this, they come as a surprise. Language so rarely get close to what we want it to say.

Think, also, of how you relate to language vis a vis your body. When you’re alert, are you on pins and needles? Can you feel the pinprick? When you’re sad, do you feel an anvil in your chest? When you feel alive, do you feel as though the whole world is refracting through you like light through a gem? These feelings in our body are automatically interpreted into other images, because that’s how our minds work—through image, comparison, interpretation.

You can certainly see how metaphors influence the reader in “Outbreaks.” Those last lines always enchant me. The comparison of god to a cluster of silent eels is rife with questions, and I love the heavy silence centering this poem, and all the different metaphors for selfhood that the poem moves through. These images dance in my mind’s eye, reaching something spiritual and true that only language can access.

So, how do we create great metaphors? Benner Dixon advises us not to hold back—to be generous with our metaphors, to lean into them, to use as many as it takes to represent the whole of what we’re writing. I love how dangerous this suggestion is, careening across language’s landscapes. Here are some suggestions of my own:

• Be visual and pay attention to detail. To be moved by a metaphor, I have to see it first, or else experience it concretely.
• Be personable. Give me doorways to relate to the metaphor in my own way, locating it in my mind or body. Metaphors that are too abstract or “out there” will often evade me, because I can’t easily resonate with them or feel them how I’m supposed to.
• Be intentional. Don’t use metaphors just because they’re poetic or literary; use them because they’re the best tools for communicating something that simple language can’t. You need a mix of the direct and the metaphoric. If you use metaphors everywhere and all the time, the most salient ideas and images in your work might be obfuscated by everything else in the text.
• Pay attention to subtle similarities. Great metaphors reshape how I see the world. They show me something I never noticed before, because they show me how different things are connected in subtle and powerful ways.
• Trust the way you view the world. A great poet leans into their mind’s idiosyncrasies. Let the ways you examine the world and make comparisons shine through in your work. And if you think that can’t be done, remember the poem you just read, in which comfort is a neon sign and god is a cluster of eels.

For more tips on the art of comparison, check out our article on Similes, Metaphors, and Analogies.