ABSTRACT
IMAGE AND METAPHOR We might call someone ‘daft as a brush’; a mother feeling the child in her womb as specially vigorous might say it’s ‘like a frog in a sock’; faced with an important decision we often say we are ‘at the crossroads’; on a good day ‘things are looking up’. All these phrases are making use of the gure 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 something palpable, usually visual, 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 rst a spark, then a piece of straw then a bubble.
