The Key to Extended Metaphor

This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate poets.

Extended metaphor is one of poetry’s simplest but most enduring tools.

I have often used it with quite young school students, who very quickly get the idea of it, and it’s often an approach that adult beginners try a lot too.

In fact I used it for one Poetry Parlor month, when I asked members to write an Extended Metaphor poem. As a result, I suddenly read a lot of them all at once, and realized that:

Extended Metaphor does have some subtleties that are very important to know if you want to make these poems work at their best.

So in this article I want to go over:

What extended metaphor is, what it adds to a poem, and how to make it work for you.

What is Extended Metaphor?

A recap of metaphor

First, let’s quickly make sure you’re up to speed on ordinary metaphor, the non-extended version:

A metaphor is a comparison that says something is in fact something else.

Examples of metaphors:

“My son’s rumpled, striped socks are two tabby cats, curled up on the hearth.”

Here the discarded socks are turned into cats. This is the most common kind of metaphor, describing a physical object as another object.

“In the gale, leaves blizzard down from the trees.”

This is a slightly less common type of metaphor, where the falling leaves are turned into snow by a verb, “blizzard.”

Metaphor is a central technique of poetry, since it immediately adds imagination, transformation, and levels of meaning.

Those two socks, for example, are transformed by being turned into cats: instead of being frankly a bit gross, they probably now appear cute! (Though they really aren’t.)

Also, making them cats invites the reader to imagine things about them: that the socks made their own way there instead of being tossed, for example, or that they are friends and like to play together....

So this is why poets use them a lot—they open up other ways of understanding, other worlds of thinking.

Extended metaphor takes it further

In some ways, extended metaphor is a lot like regular metaphor. It is still a comparison, where one thing turns into another one.

But there are two crucial differences between regular metaphor and extended metaphor.

First, length. Most metaphors in poetry are short—they probably don’t even take up a whole line of a poem. But, as the name suggests, extended metaphors keep going. The comparison that’s made by an extended metaphor definitely goes over more than one line—in fact, it might make up an entire poem.

And second, the extended metaphor has to have multiple points of connection, or comparison, with the thing it describes. In other words, there must be several different ways that the extended metaphor is like the original thing. Usually this means one big, overarching connection, then several smaller connections within that.

Extended Metaphor in Action

An example will help—so let’s talk about the funny, rude, and insightful poem “A Puppy Called Puberty” by Adrian Mitchell. You can read the whole thing here, but here are the first few lines:

A Puppy Called Puberty

        It was like keeping a puppy in your underpants
        A secret puppy you weren’t allowed to show to anyone
        Not even your best friend or your worst enemy
        You wanted to pat him stroke him cuddle him
        All the time but you weren’t supposed to touch him

Mitchell’s extended metaphor is announced in the title: Puberty = Puppy.

That is the comparison that the whole poem is built on.

Then he spends the rest of the poem explaining the ways that puberty, at least for an adolescent boy, is like a puppy.

As he does this, he gives us several different ways that these two ideas relate.

In the lines I’ve quoted already, the boy’s desire constantly to pat the puppy relates to a teenage boy’s desire to touch and explore his own body parts—I’ll say no more than that...
Then Mitchell says that the puppy would “suddenly perk up his head” at the most inappropriate times—the way that teenage boys’ bodies sometimes involuntarily reveal their sexual feelings!
Finally, he shows how the boy and puppy are only really comfortable when alone together, “gazing at each other / Through hot and hazy daydreams.” I expect you get the idea behind this aspect of the puppy too.

In summary, Mitchell first of all makes his big, overarching connection—puberty is a puppy—and then explores it in depth through making several smaller connections within that idea.

Thus Mitchell extends his metaphor to the length of a whole poem, or 24 lines.

What extended metaphor adds

Benefits for the reader

I’d say that there are three main things that a good extended metaphor does for the reader of a poem:

The originality and ingenuity of the metaphor itself can be a source of delight.
The reader can appreciate how cleverly and accurately the poet ties everything together between the metaphor and underlying subject.
The metaphor can also make reader think about your “real” topic in new, fresh, and perceptive ways.

Again, “A Puppy Called Puberty” shows these things very well.

Comparing puberty to a pet is an unusual idea (originality), but once Mitchell takes us through it, we see how faithfully it actually does represent aspects of male puberty (skill in tying together metaphor and topic), and through the development of the metaphor, we can understand what male puberty might feel like, whether or not we’ve experienced it for ourselves (learning more about the “real” topic).

Benefits for you

Those three elements make extended metaphor poems well worth trying, but there is another reason why you might want to create one of your own: they’re fun to make!

When you see how one thing could be compared to another, not just once, but in several ways; and you also feel that this comparison says something new and insightful about your topic, that is a really exciting time—sure to get your imagination and creativity racing!

So I highly recommend it. But before you start, I just want to make sure you know:

The key to making extended metaphor work

“A Puppy Called Puberty” also brilliantly illustrates the most crucial element in making an extended metaphor really successful, which is:

The metaphor should take on its own life and reality.

In other words, it’s not enough merely to state the connections between your subject and your metaphor. In order to make those connections really hit home—to convince the reader that they work, and are worth listening too—you have to portray the extended metaphor with detail.

**In his poem, Mitchell does this by depicting exactly how each aspect of the Puberty-Puppy works.**

So when he says, “It was like keeping a puppy in your underpants,” he doesn’t just leave it there—he fleshes that idea out by explaining that this is “A secret puppy” that you can’t “show to anyone.”

And when he says that the puppy would “perk up his head” at all the wrong moments, Mitchell expands this idea with an excruciating picture of a bus ride where the boy has to leave the bus “bent double” so that no one sees his excited “puppy”…

Through this detail, the extended metaphor comes to feel real to the reader—at least as real as the thing you originally wanted to convey.

In fact, the imagined world of the extended metaphor may be the only thing you need to convey the “real” world that lies behind it.

Adrian Mitchell does not need to say anything directly about the teenage boy’s experience of puberty, because the puppy metaphor does it all for him.

Thus, a really successful extended metaphor poem, like Mitchell’s, gives equal weight to its two levels:

The metaphorical level is vivid, interesting and believable for its own sake. (In Mitchell’s poem, this level is what we learn about puppy.)
The underlying “real” level genuinely illuminated by the metaphor, so we know that the poem is not just an exercise in ingenuity, but really has something to say. ((In Mitchell’s poem, this level is what we learn about puberty.)

So, if you’re writing an extended metaphor of your own, remember that it’s crucial to make the world of the extended metaphor detailed and engaging, so the reader believes in it and it what it has to say about your topic.

Next Steps

Most likely you’ve written Extended Metaphor poems before. But here’s an activity to help make the Extended Metaphor really convincing .

Let’s start with a topic that you definitely know—your own writing process.

Make a list of comparisons (metaphors) for your writing process. Aim for 10 or more.
For example, is writing a poem like….
—building a house?
—baking a cake?
—packing a suitcase?
—painting a room?
—getting the children off to school?
Write down everything you can think of, including the bad ideas!
Choose a couple of these comparisons, and break them down into their separate parts.
For example, Getting the Children Off to School involves:
—Waking them up
—Feeding them breakfast
—Making sure they’ve washed, brushed teeth, and chosen suitable clothes
—Doing last-minute homework
—Dealing with panics over last-minute homework
—Packing bags with food, water bottles, rain gear, etc.
—Shoving them out the door!
Work out how (if at all) these parts connect with the process of writing poems.
—Waking up the children might be like stirring up the first ideas for a poem
—Feeding them breakfast is like expanding and nurturing those ideas, make them more robust and fleshed out
—Making sure the children have washed and dressed right is like getting words to look right and mean the right things in a first draft
—Dealing with panics over homework is like the crisis of confidence that often comes after the first draft is done, and it seems that the poem will not work out
—Actually doing last-minute homework might be like redrafting…. though I’m not convinced by this one.
—Packing their bags is like making sure a final draft has all it needs to succeed: title, clarity, enough meaning but not too many words.
—Sending them out the door is like sending poems out into the world to be read by others.
Choose the comparison that seems to connect best with your writing process, and draft a poem!
Remember to include details that make the Extended Metaphor seem real.
So in my example, I might describe:
—The words/children being sleepy and dopey when they first “wake up”
—How the words/children grow more animated and expressive once they’ve had “breakfast”
—The agitation the poet/parent feels when there’s doubt over whether “homework” will work out
And so on…

I hope you have fun exploring this tool!