Day 2: Metaphor and Deciphering Meaning

Tenor and Vehicle
Metaphors is a kind of comparison that describes one thing as if it were another. There are two parts to a metaphor: the tenor and the vehicle.


A metaphor expresses the unfamiliar or abstract (the "tenor") in terms of the familiar or concrete (the "vehicle"). When Neil Young sings, "Love is a rose," "rose" is the vehicle for "love," the tenor. The physical characteristics and qualities of a rose are used to metaphorically describe the nature of love.

The concept, idea, or thing that is the subject of the metaphor is called the tenor.

The thing the tenor is being compared to, or object "carrying" the comparison, is the vehicle.

Consider:

You are a shiny apple.

tenor vehicle
you apple

The point of similarity between a metaphor’s tenor and the vehicle is called the ground. In other words, the ground is what gives an effective metaphor its power and sense of aptness.

For example, consider:

Life is like a box of chocolates... you never know what you are going to get.

In this example, life is the tenor and a box of chocolates is the vehicle. What they have in common is the ground, the fact that you never know what’s inside a box of chocolates or what life has in store.

in this riddle, all you have is the vehicle and you need to figure out what the real tenor or subject of the comparison is.


A Riddle

In a marble hall white as milk
Lined with skin as soft as silk
Within a fountain crystal-clear
A golden apple doeth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in to steal its gold.

 

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in this poem, you have a clear tenor or subject of the poem--the author--but you have multiple metaphoric comparisons or vehicles to describe some important quality about the author


Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory; fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

--Sylvia Plath

 

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similar to the poem above, the subject or tenor of this metaphor is clear--love. The various metaphoric comparisons or vehicles provide information about the nature of love


Sonnet 116

Let me not to marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I neve writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

~William Shakespeare.