Metaphor
Finder.Every figure, located and read

A metaphor is a direct assertion that one thing is another. Not resembles, not evokes: is. When Shakespeare writes that all the world's a stage, no comparison is offered for your approval; the identification has already happened, and the sentence proceeds as if it were fact. That confidence is the figure's engine.

A simile is the cautious cousin. It announces itself with 'like' or 'as' and keeps both terms visible, which changes the effect entirely; there is a separate Simile Finder for those. An extended metaphor, sometimes called a conceit, sustains one identification across stanzas or a whole poem, the way Donne stretches a pair of compasses over three dozen lines.

And then there are the dead ones. The leg of a table, the mouth of a river, the heart of the matter: metaphors so worn that no reader feels the transfer anymore. The finder distinguishes a live figure from fossilized idiom, because only the live ones belong in an essay.

Paste a poem into the form above and run it. The engine behind this page is the Storgy Poem Analyzer, which reads the text line by line and, among everything else it reports, names each figure it finds: this line holds a metaphor, this one a simile, this one gives the wind a grudge, which is personification.

The useful part is not the label but the explanation attached to it. For every figure, the reading says what the figure is doing: what gets carried from one term to the other, why the poet reached for this image and not a plainer word, how the figure connects to the poem's larger argument. Knowing a metaphor exists is trivia. Knowing what it does is analysis.

Extended metaphors get traced rather than tallied, so a conceit that develops across four stanzas comes back as one reading, not four disconnected sightings.

For students, located figures are essay evidence. The difference between 'Dickinson uses metaphor' and 'in line one, Dickinson fuses hope with a bird, and the fusion holds through the gale of stanza two' is the difference between an assertion and an argument, and examiners reward the second. The finder hands you the line numbers and the reading; the essay is yours to build.

For writers, the finder is a mirror. Mixed metaphors are nearly invisible from inside your own draft — the ship of state that takes root and blossoms — because you wrote each image on a different day. An outside reading catches the collision instantly, along with the dead metaphors you did not notice you were leaning on.

If you want the device itself rather than a reading of your poem, the reference page at /devices/metaphor/ covers the definition, the taxonomy, and examples drawn from the Storgy corpus.