Learning about Figurative Language How to use simile and metaphor like a boss.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Just how is the sky like a patient etherized upon a table? If two roads diverged in a wood, why should I care?

Why can’t poets just say what they mean? You’ve probably heard this before, either in the classroom or outside of it. Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, after wrestling with a particularly difficult poem. It sounds like a simple request for clarity, but the question points out a number of assumptions about how we communicate, not just as poets but as people. It shows a preference for plain, matter-of-fact speech, and it suggests that all the figurative language poets are so fond of—metaphor, simile, and more—is just too frilly and flashy. But in real life, figurative language is everywhere, and we never say what we mean completely, because language often fails us. For instance, every time we try to tell people how much we love them—like, really really love them—the words seem woefully inadequate to the task. Not only that, we can sense they’ve been said before countless times by countless others. They aren’t really doing the job. We want to express our feelings as originally as possible, in order to give them the power in words that we feel in ourselves. And that’s where figurative language can help.