What Is an Extended Metaphor? | Definition & Examples

Extended metaphors are simply longer metaphors. They are often used by poets and writers to impress readers with a sustained comparison between two objects that are unlike each other. It can showcase the writer’s ability to come up with original, creative ways of looking at things. 

It can also achieve a kind of unity or coherence of effect to have a comparison extended throughout several lines or through the course of an entire work. Here is a formal definition of the term: 

An extended metaphor is a comparison between two things that are unalike, which stretches over several lines of verse, sentences, paragraphs, or an entire work. 

Extended metaphors are not simply an exercise in the poet or writer’s skill in demonstrating the similarities between two unlike things. It also can reveal deeper meaning and enhance the theme or the idea that the writer is trying to highlight. In this article, we look at a few more examples of extended metaphors, including those from Emily Dickinson and the Jamaican poet Dennis Scott.

Portrait of Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson’s extended metaphors

Emily Dickinson’s most famous extended metaphor is the poem “Because I could not stop for Death” (published in 1890). It’s a poem where death is compared to a gentlemanly coachman. 

It has even been described as a modern metaphysical conceit — a type of extended metaphor developed by the so-called metaphysical poets in England, such as Jon Donne and Andrew Marvel. To learn more about metaphysical conceits, you can check out the following article: What Is a Metaphysical Conceit? | Definition & Examples

Here are the first two stanzas of the poem:

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

This extended metaphor is unique in that it takes a usually frightening concept and turns it into something mild-mannered and gentle, taking the sting out of death. Another good example of an extended metaphor by Emily Dickinson is the poem “I like to see it lap the Miles” (published in 1891): 

I like to see it lap the Miles —

And lick the Valleys up —

And stop to feed itself at Tanks — 

And then — prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains —

And supercilious peer

In Shanties — by the sides of Roads — 

And then a Quarry pare

To fit its sides

And crawl between

Complaining all the while

In horrid — hooting stanza — 

Then chase itself down Hill — 

And neigh like Boanerges —

Then — prompter than a Star

Stop — docile and omnipotent

At its own stable door —

This is an extended metaphor where a train is compared to a horse. Just like “I Could Not Stop to Death,” we see a mild and even optimistic and romantic spin being put on a subject, which is vastly different from death: modern industry in the form of a locomotive train. 

The poet uses vivid imagery, with some of them being quite subtle and dense. For example “neigh like Boanerges” is a biblical allusion, referring to Jesus naming two of his followers the “sons of thunder,” who were known for being loud. 

The metaphor is rather apt as a train would be the modern and industrial equivalent of the horse that it replaced in terms of its role in travel and transportation. Emily Dickinson, in that regard, can be compared to Walt Whitman and the future generation of modern free verse poets, who recognized the themes of industry and urban life as being as worthy of poetry as traditional natural themes. 

It would be useful to compare her poem to Whitman’s ode “To a Locomotive in Winter.”  Where Whitman emphasizes the raw power and industrial aspects of the locomotive, Dickinson focuses on clever and well-wrought metaphors that portray the raw industrial power of the train as the gentle actions and nature of a domesticated or “docile” animal. In fact, the penultimate line sums up the whole poem — "docile and omnipotent" — an accurate description of the industrial technology that supports modern civilization.

So what is the subtext or deeper meaning of the poem? The answer is closely related to the theme of the poem. Dickinson’s extended metaphor comparing a locomotive to a horse can be seen as an argument showing how the invention of the train is little more than an extension of the civilizational instinct that drove man to tame wild horses.

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Hidden meaning in extended metaphors

The meaning in Dickinson’s poem is not obvious at first sight. The poem at first glance is just an enjoyable poem that does a superb job of comparing a train to a horse. However, the comparison in and of itself is powerful and apt enough to prove the point of the poem: A locomotive train as one more triumphant stage of humankind conquering nature, as they did previously by taming the horse.

Our next example is less subtle and more pessimistic. It is Slyvia Plath’s fig tree analogy from her novel The Bell Jar (published in 1963). This extended metaphor compares a pear tree full of ripe fruit with the several choices that a young woman at the beginning of her career can make. It presents the protagonist of the novel — Esther Greenwood — being paralyzed by life choices presented to her in the form of a fig tree ripe and replete with fruit. 

Each fruit symbolizes an equally attractive choice for her future life: writer, wife, traveller, Olympic athlete, etc. She doesn’t know which one to choose from since choosing one fruit means losing out on the other equally attractive options:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The implications of the quote are depressing. The protagonist suffers from mental illness, and the paralysis that she suffers from is simply the feeling that her life is being stifled and closed in by her mental illness. After all, the title of the novel — The Bell Jar — was meant to describe a woman who feels trapped like an insect beneath a bell jar turned upside down.

Our last example of an extended metaphor is Dennis Scott’s famous poem, “Marrysong” (published in1989). Here’s an extract from the beginning of the poem:

He never learned her, quite. Year after year

that territory, without seasons, shifted

under his eye. An hour he could be lost

in the walled anger of her quarried hurt

or turning, see cool water laughing where

the day before there were stones in her voice.

The poet here is comparing his wife’s emotions to a landscape that requires skilled navigation. At first, the metaphor is obvious. However, a close reading of the poem suggests that the metaphor may have deeper meaning and significance. Scott could be describing the nature of the relationship between him and his country, Jamaica. So, in this case, the landscape being described would have been the actual country itself. 

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, November 07). What Is an Extended Metaphor? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/extended-metaphor