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and Carl Sandburg are excellent material for a study of the use of comparisons.

Similes, then, are valuable aids to the poet, but similes that are too like or too unlike, too commonplace or too Summary strained, fail of their effect. A successful simile arouses the mental suggestion which the poet wishes it to convey. All this is, of course, true of other figures of speech.

The second most common figure of speech is the metaphor. Metaphors A metaphor is a comparison implied rather than

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he used similes to express what his love meant to him. If he had not made the direct comparison but had said, "My luve is a red, red rose," and "My luve is a melodie," he would have been using metaphors. When Tennyson said of Guine

vere:

"Sea was her wrath yet working after storm,"

he meant that her wrath was like the sea; but he condensed his simile into a metaphor. Metaphors are extremely common in poetry and in daily speech. Indeed, most of our slang is metaphorical.

A figure of speech closely allied to metaphor and simile is allegory. An allegory is the description of one thing under Allegory the likeness of another. It is a sort of expanded metaphor in the form of a story usually teaching some truth or belief which the reader is left to discover. For instance, if we say, "Man's progress towards salvation is like the journey of a man who abandons home, friends, and all earthly

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"Sea was her wrath yet working after storm'

pursuits in order to seek a distant city," we are using a simile. If we say, "Man's progress towards salvation is the journey of a man who abandons home, friends, and all earthly pursuits in order to seek a distant city," we are condensing that simile into a metaphor. But if we tell the story of a man's journey toward a distant city in such a way that at every point the reader realizes that our story is really the likeness of any man's progress towards salvation in this world, we have expanded our metaphor into an allegory. This particular allegory is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, perhaps the most perfect example of prose allegory. A simple illustration of the difference between allegory, metaphor, and simile is this:

Simile: Israel is like a vine brought out of Egypt and planted in Palestine.

Metaphor: Israel is a vine brought out of Egypt and planted in
Palestine.

Allegory: God brought a vine out of Egypt and planted

it in Palestine.

Allegory is a very common way of teaching a lesson. The parables in the New Testament are allegories, and so are Æsop's fables.

the King as

an allegory

The most striking example of this figure which you will come across in your reading of poetry is Tennyson's Idylls of the King. In Gareth and Lynette, for in- The Idylls of stance, the description of the gate is allegorical. The whole idyll of The Holy Grail may be interpreted allegorically. In this idyll the visions of Percivale are an allegorical way of saying that Percivale must give up sensual pleasures, domestic happiness, wealth, and fame if he intends to seek the vision of God. In fact the whole series of idylls represents the eternal war between the powers of good and evil that goes on in the heart of any man who seeks to make himself

perfect. Many of the characters, such as the Lady of the Lake, the three Queens, Merlin, and even Arthur himself may be reduced to mere allegorical figures.

gory

Allegory is a good way of teaching a lesson but it is often a confusing way of telling a story. If the allegorical meaning Difficulties of is kept clear throughout, the characters are writing allelikely to become mere abstractions; if, on the other hand, the characters and events become interesting in themselves, the allegorical meaning is likely to drop out of sight. The Idylls of the King illustrate this difficulty. The allegorical meaning appears only at intervals, and the lesson might perhaps have been as well taught by the story without the aid of allegory. Tennyson himself became somewhat irritated at being frequently asked to explain the allegorical significance of this or that passage or character. He often said that the Idylls could be read intelligently without regard to the allegory; but there are passages which seem to require the allegorical interpretation.

It is interesting to see how closely related to similes and metaphors most figures of speech are. Probably the maPersonification jority of them are based on either similarity or contrast. There is personification, for instance. Personification is the figure of speech by which we speak of things that are not persons as though they were persons. This is a figure that is as natural for the child as for the poet. It is natural for a little girl to think of her doll as a person because by that simple expedient she can make it more real. It was natural for the pagans of antiquity to personify the forces of nature as gods and goddesses because in that way they could give expression to their instinctive feeling that these forces were guided by some Intelligent Power for some purpose which they could but dimly comprehend. The poet, especially in his simpler moods, uses personification frequently. Stevenson's little poem about the wind

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