An extended metaphor is a metaphor that the writer keeps going over several lines, a paragraph or a whole work, adding new details from the same source instead of making the comparison once. In As You Like It, Jaques says “All the world's a stage” and then keeps going: men and women are players, birth and death are entrances and exits, and a life is a play in seven acts. It is also called a sustained metaphor.
Below: how an extended metaphor is built, how it differs from a conceit and an allegory, examples from poems, plays, scripture and speeches, and a method for writing one that holds together. To tell a single metaphor from a simile or an analogy, start with analogy vs metaphor.
How an extended metaphor works
Every metaphor has two halves: the subject being described and the image it is compared to (critics call them the tenor and the vehicle; the analogy vs metaphor guide explains the terms). A plain metaphor makes the connection once. An extended metaphor goes back to the image for more, and each new detail from the image says something new about the subject.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
From there Jaques walks through the seven ages, each a role: the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the foolish old man in slippers, and “second childishness.” Laid out side by side, the two halves line up part for part:
| In the theater (the image) | In a life (the subject) |
|---|---|
| In the theater (the image)The stage | In a life (the subject)The world |
| In the theater (the image)Players | In a life (the subject)Men and women |
| In the theater (the image)Entrances and exits | In a life (the subject)Births and deaths |
| In the theater (the image)Many parts | In a life (the subject)The roles one person plays over a lifetime |
| In the theater (the image)Seven acts | In a life (the subject)Seven ages, from infant to old age |
| In the theater (the image)The last scene | In a life (the subject)Second childishness and oblivion |
A useful way to read one is in three moves. The writer plants the image, often plainly, develops it with verbs and details that belong to the image's world, and closes it, often on the detail where the comparison does the most work. Jaques closes on the last scene, where the theater metaphor makes old age sound like a play running out of lines.
Extended metaphor vs conceit and allegory
These terms overlap, and many textbooks blur them. The useful differences are length and how unlike the two halves are.
| Device | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| DeviceMetaphor | What it isOne thing called another, once | Example“Juliet is the sun” |
| DeviceExtended metaphor | What it isOne comparison developed through several details | Example“All the world's a stage” |
| DeviceConceit | What it isAn extended metaphor joining two very unlike things, argued cleverly | ExampleDonne's lovers as the legs of a compass |
| DeviceAllegory | What it isA whole story whose characters and events stand for ideas | ExampleJohn Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) |
| DeviceAnalogy | What it isA comparison of how two things work, used to explain or argue | ExampleThe heart works like a pump |
| DeviceSymbol | What it isAn object that stands for more than itself, with no comparison stated | ExampleBlake's sick rose |
Conceit
A conceit is an extended metaphor that surprises: the two halves seem to have nothing in common until the poet argues the link into place. The metaphysical poets of the 1600s, John Donne above all, made it their signature. Samuel Johnson, who disliked the habit, complained in his life of Abraham Cowley (1779) that in their verse “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” An older kind, the Petrarchan conceit, compares a beloved's eyes to the sun or her lips to coral, and Shakespeare gently mocked it in Sonnet 130: “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.”
Allegory
An allegory is a narrative in which the characters, places and events stand for something else, usually ideas. In The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian travels from the City of Destruction toward the Celestial City and gets stuck in the Slough of Despond. An extended metaphor sits inside a text and compares one thing to another; an allegory is the whole text, and every element in it carries a second meaning.
Conceit. Our marriage is a compass: you hold the center, I draw the circle, and the farther I travel, the more you lean my way.
Allegory. Each morning a traveler named Restless walks out of the village, and each evening his wife, Constance, keeps a lamp in the window until he finds his way back.
The conceit names its subject (“our marriage”) and argues the likeness openly. The allegory never names its subject. It tells a story, and the names make the characters stand for ideas.
Extended metaphor examples in poetry
Hope as a bird
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I've heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
Put the bird's first appearance beside its last. At the start, the image only gives hope a body: a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings. By the last stanza the same bird has been heard “in the chillest land” and “on the strangest Sea,” and yet “never – in Extremity, / It asked a crumb – of me.” That final detail is what the extension makes visible. A bird you keep needs feeding; this one never asks, so hope turns out to give without taking, something a one-line metaphor couldn't show. In between, each stanza adds one more fact about small birds: it sings without words, and sings sweetest in a gale. The word “hope” appears once, in the first line, and the rest of the poem never has to name it again.
Lovers as a compass
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The speaker is leaving on a journey, and he compares the two lovers to the legs of a drawing compass. She is the fixed foot at the center; he is the foot that travels. When he roams, she leans after him; when he returns, she straightens. And because she holds firm, his circle closes and he comes back where he started. Love poems rarely mention geometry tools, which is part of why the conceit is memorable: every detail of the instrument has been made to mean something.
A life as a road
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The roads stand for choices, the wood for a life, and the undergrowth for the part of the future no one can see. Read the middle stanzas closely, though. The speaker admits the two paths had been worn “really about the same,” so the last stanza is a prediction of the story he will tell later, sigh included. Frost wrote the poem partly as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who on their walks could never decide which way to go. The extended metaphor carries an irony most quotations of the last line leave out.
The nation as a ship
O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
Whitman wrote it in 1865, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The captain is Lincoln, the ship is the nation, the fearful trip is the Civil War and the prize is victory. The whole poem stays on deck: crowds on the shore cheer the ship into port while the speaker walks the deck where the captain lies, “fallen cold and dead.”
Extended metaphors in plays and prose
ROMEO. If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, …
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
At their first meeting Romeo casts himself as a pilgrim and Juliet as a saint's shrine. Juliet takes the metaphor and turns it back on him: pilgrims touch hands with saints, they don't kiss them. The two of them extend it together through a shared sonnet, which makes the flirtation a game both can play.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
The first verses extend the shepherd: pastures, still waters, and later the rod and the staff. Then the psalm moves to a second image, a host who sets a table and fills a cup. The shift comes at a verse break and is complete, which is one way to tell a deliberate change of image from a mixed metaphor.
Speeches use extended metaphors to turn an argument into a story. A well-known modern case is the “bad check” passage in Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream,” which recasts the nation's founding promises as a debt that has not been paid. The analysis of the speech walks through it.
How to write an extended metaphor
- Start with what you want to say
Name the subject and the one thing about it the reader should feel or understand. “My grandmother's kitchen was where the family came back to” is a subject with a point. The metaphor comes after.
- Choose a concrete image with parts
An extended metaphor needs a source with several pieces you can use: a harbor has boats, a breakwater, a lamp and moorings. Pick something the reader can picture without help, and avoid images worn smooth by use, such as life as a journey or a roller coaster.
- Map the parts before you draft
Write two columns: the parts of the image and what each stands for in your subject. Keep the pairs that fit and cross out the ones you have to force.
- Plant it plainly
State the metaphor early and simply. The reader needs to know which image you are using before you develop it.
- Develop it with verbs
Let the subject act in the image's vocabulary: relatives “dock,” “sail” and “tie up.” Verbs extend a metaphor more quietly than new nouns do.
- Close where it does the most work
End on the pair that carries your point, and stop before the image runs out. If the next detail would need explaining, the metaphor is finished.
My grandmother's kitchen was a harbor. Sooner or later everyone in the family docked there: my uncle after the divorce, my cousin with her first baby, me the summer I failed chemistry. She kept the kettle going like a lamp on the breakwater, and she never asked where you had sailed from, only whether you had eaten. When she died we stood around her table with nowhere to tie up.
The image is planted in the first sentence and never changes. Each detail adds a pair: relatives as boats, the kettle as a lamp, the past as a voyage, grief as having nowhere to moor. The last pair carries the point, so the paragraph ends there.
Common mistakes with extended metaphors
The commonest is the mixed metaphor: switching to a second image halfway, so the reader has to drop one picture and pick up another.
Before: The launch was a marathon, and by week three the team had hit a wall, so we shifted gears and steered the ship back on course.
After: The launch was a marathon. By week three the team had hit the wall runners talk about at mile twenty, so we slowed the pace, took water at every station and let the strongest runners set the tempo for the last stretch.
The first version has three images (a race, a car, a ship). The second stays with the race and lets every detail come from it.
An extended metaphor that holds
- One image, planted early and kept
- Each new detail adds a pair that says something new
- Verbs from the image's world do most of the work
- Ends on the pair that carries the point
- Trusts the reader to see the matches
One that falls apart
- A second image takes over halfway through
- Details repeat the same point in new costumes
- Every match is explained (“the kettle, which stood for her care”)
- Keeps going after the parts stop fitting
- The image gets more attention than the subject
A metaphor stretched over a whole chapter can also turn into a motif, which is fine when it is deliberate. When it isn't, readers may notice the image more than the story, and the prose tips toward purple prose.
When you revise a long passage, ask the Strokes Assistant to list every word that belongs to your image and flag any that come from somewhere else. A stray verb from a second source is often where a mixed metaphor starts.
Practice: is it extended?
These lines are original, written for this guide. Decide whether each is a plain metaphor, an extended metaphor, a mixed metaphor, a conceit or an allegory.
- Her inbox was a swamp.
- Her inbox was a swamp: every morning she waded in up to the knees, and by noon the newsletters had closed over her head.
- The proposal was a seed we planted in March, but it got lost in the shuffle and never saw the light of day.
- The old editor ran the newsroom like a lighthouse keeper: awake when everyone else slept, trimming every wick, and never once leaving the light to see who it had saved.
- His temper was a short fuse.
- My heart is a tax return: every April you audit it, find nothing declared, and still I owe.
- In the town of Later, everyone means to leave tomorrow, and the mayor, Someday, has promised a road out for forty years.
Answers. 1 and 5 are plain metaphors: each makes the comparison once and stops. 2 is extended, because it goes back to the swamp for more (wading in, then going under). 3 is mixed: a seed, a deck of cards and a sunrise arrive in one sentence, so no image gets developed. 4 is extended too, though its “like” makes it strictly an extended simile; the method is the same. 6 is a conceit: a heart and a tax return have nothing obvious in common, and the line argues the link through three details. 7 is a small allegory. It tells a story, never names its subject, and lets the town and its mayor stand for putting things off.
Frequently asked questions
Is an extended metaphor the same as a conceit?
A conceit is a kind of extended metaphor. The word is used for comparisons between two strikingly unlike things, worked out with ingenuity, like John Donne's comparison of two lovers to the legs of a drawing compass. Every conceit is an extended metaphor, but most extended metaphors are not surprising enough to be called conceits.
What is the difference between an extended metaphor and an allegory?
An allegory is a whole story in which characters, places and events stand for ideas, such as Christian's journey in The Pilgrim's Progress. An extended metaphor is a comparison inside a text, even a long one. A quick test: an extended metaphor usually names its subject ("Hope is the thing with feathers"), while an allegory leaves the subject unnamed and lets the story carry it.
How long does an extended metaphor have to be?
There is no fixed length. Two sentences that develop the same image already count, and some run for a whole poem or chapter. What matters is that the writer returns to the image and adds at least one new matching detail, rather than stating the comparison once and moving on.
