ABSTRACT
We might call someone ‘daft as a brush’, or say of something that doesn’t work very well that it’s a ‘lemon’, or, faced with an important decision, that we are ‘at the crossroads’, or that ‘things are looking up’. All these phrases are making use of the figure of speech known as metaphor. There are many different types of metaphor but they share the characteristic of saying one thing in terms of another. At the heart of metaphor, the vehicle which connects the subject of the utterance with the quality being evoked, is an image: the brush, the lemon, the crossroads, the act of lifting the eyes. In the poem at the head of this chapter our body is first a spark, then a piece of straw, then a bubble.
