Metaphor in English Literature

Let us take two dialogues between two lovers’:

Male: You are my Juliet, my sweet darling!

Female: And you are my Romeo, my sweet heart!

Here, the comparisons with Romeo and Juliet are the example of metaphor. So we can say that metaphor is a figure of speech in which a comparison between two different things is implied but not explicitly stated.

The word “Metaphor” comes from the Greek “meta” meaning “over” and “phera” meaning “carry”. Indeed it means “literary carrying over”. By this figure of speech, a word is transferred or carried over from the object to which it belongs another in such a manner that a comparison is implied. Though, in a metaphor one thing is compared with another thing, the other thing may be present, masked or totally absent. For example, in his sonnet “London 1802”, Wordsworth writes:

“Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!
England hath need of thee: She is a fen

Of stagnant water!”

In these above lines a comparison between two different things- England and fen- is made an implicit way. The point of their comparison is their stagnancy or lack of progress. At last I would like to mention Dr. Johnson’s remark: “It is a great excellence in a style when used with propriety”.

Elegy in English Literature

In Greek and Roman literature “elegy” denoted any poem written in elegiac metre. The term was also used to referring to the subjects and moods frequently expressed in the elegiac verse form, especially complaints about love. In Europe and England, the term continued to have a variable application through the Renaissance. For example, John Donne’s Elegies are love poems. In the course of the seventeenth century, however, the term began to be limited to its present usage: a lament lyric of mourning or an utterance of personal bereavement and sorrow and therefore it should be characterized by absolute sincerity of emotion and expression. In the evolution of literature, the elegy has achieved a great elaboration and has expanded in many directions. It has grown into a memorial poem which contains the poet’s tribute to some great men and often a study of his life and character, as in Spenser’s Astrophel, Milton’s Lycidas. Often the philosophic and speculative elements become predominant in it. Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” is one of the most frankly personal of elegies a large tribute to the dead friend, a spiritual autobiography extending over some three years of intellectual struggle, and a poem of philosophy.

The elegy in modern literature has often been used as a vehicle for literary criticism. One particular type of elegy is the pastoral elegy, in which the poet expresses his sorrow under the mask of a shepherd mourning for a company. This type of elegy is originated among the Sicilian Greeks. It passes into modern European literatures during the Renaissance. It has often been employed by English poets from Spencer to Matthew Arnold. Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is one of the most famous pastoral elegies.