Figurative Language
Figurative Language
A metaphor does not describe something. It replaces it. When a writer says one thing is another thing, they are asking the reader to carry the qualities of the second thing over onto the first, and to feel why that transfer makes sense. Figurative language is the umbrella term for this kind of non-literal writing, language that says something untrue on the surface in order to express something true underneath. It shows up everywhere from casual speech to the most carefully built poem, and once you start noticing it, you start seeing how much of communication depends on comparisons nobody bothers to explain.
Writers reach for figurative language when plain description runs out of power. Telling a reader that a town is small and unremarkable is accurate but forgettable. Elizabeth Brewster does something sharper in "Road Between Saskatoon and Edmonton." Driving past the small prairie towns she knows well, each with its grain elevator and its church, she writes that "the little towns are prairie cliches." She is not saying the towns resemble cliches. She is saying they are cliches, flattening them into the tired, over-repeated version of themselves that a bored traveler sees instead of the version a resident would recognize. That single metaphor does more work than a paragraph of description could, because it tells you exactly how the speaker's eye has gone dull to a landscape she is trying to call home.
A comparison does not need to erase the seam between two things to be powerful. Sometimes a writer wants the reader to feel the distance between the two things even while connecting them, and that is what a simile is for. Michael Ondaatje writes, in "To a Sad Daughter," that sun "spilled over you like a thick yellow miracle." The word "like" keeps the comparison honest. Sunlight is not literally a miracle, but the simile lets Ondaatje hold both ideas up at once and let the reader feel the strange, almost excessive tenderness of a parent watching a child in an ordinary moment.
Jeannette Armstrong builds an entire short story, "Blue Against White," around this kind of figurative thinking. Her main character Lena, returning home to the reserve after time away, describes herself walking up a hill carrying one bag, feeling "light, weightless, and somehow insubstantial like the last fluffseeds still clinging shakily to the milkweeds." That simile does not just describe how Lena's body feels. It tells the reader she does not yet feel solidly attached to this place, the way a loose seed has not yet taken root. A few pages later, Armstrong turns the front door of Lena's mother's house into something bigger than a door. She calls it "a blue barrier against the cold north wind" and "a cool blue shield against the summer heat," and by the end of the story that door has become a symbol, an object that stands for something beyond its literal function, in this case for home, memory, and belonging.
Metaphor states that one thing is another thing, with no "like" or "as" to soften the claim. Brewster's "prairie cliches" is a metaphor, and so is Ondaatje's description of his own low moods as "my purple world," where purple stands in directly for a feeling rather than being compared to one.
Simile makes a similar comparison but signals it openly using "like" or "as," which keeps both halves of the comparison visible to the reader at once. Ondaatje's "like a thick yellow miracle" and Armstrong's "like the last fluffseeds" are both similes.
Personification gives human feeling, action, or intention to something that cannot actually feel, act, or intend. In "Blue Against White," a crow calls out from a church steeple, and Lena treats it as though it is mocking her, thinking "You, old pretender, you don't fool me... You're no smarter than me!" Armstrong is not claiming the crow actually understands language. She is using personification to show how Lena's grief makes her read intention into everything around her.
Imagery is language built from sensory detail, the sights, sounds, textures, and smells a writer chooses so a reader experiences a scene rather than just being told about it. Armstrong's description of the road home, "cracked mud tracks which froze in the fall and stayed hidden under the snow and ice in winter," is imagery doing the work of a whole season in a single sentence.
Symbol is an object, person, or place that stands for an idea larger than itself. The blue door in Armstrong's story starts as a literal detail and grows into a symbol of home and identity by the story's final line, when Lena reaches for the same door "that stood out clearly against the white."
Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration used for emotional effect rather than literal truth. When Ondaatje writes "I'll sell my arms for you," he does not mean it as a real offer. The exaggeration is the point, it tells the reader how far past reasonable his devotion runs.
Figurative language always trades literal accuracy for emotional or intellectual precision. A good metaphor, simile, or symbol is not decoration added after the sentence is finished. It is the sentence doing its real work, choosing exactly which comparison will make a reader feel the writer's meaning instead of just reading it. The same is true of imagery, personification, and hyperbole. Each one asks a reader to accept something not literally true in order to arrive at something that is.
The Canadian Encyclopedia's entry on Elizabeth Brewster (thecanadianencyclopedia.ca) covers her career and her connection to the University of Saskatchewan. Poetry In Voice (poetryinvoice.ca) has a short author profile as well.
As you read Brewster's poem, watch for every place she names something using a word that does not literally belong to it. What does each of those choices tell you about how she sees the prairie?