Tropes & Figures
Metaphor
Metaphor is a trope that transfers the name of one object to another on the basis of their similarity, creating a hidden, condensed comparison without the conjunctions "like," "as if." Metaphor is the most powerful means of artistic imagery: it brings together distant phenomena, revealing an unexpected commonality in them, and thereby illuminates the world anew. A distinction is drawn between linguistic metaphors (dead, habitual: "the leg of a table") and individual-authorial ones (fresh, poetic). An extended metaphor may organise an entire image or work. In Ukrainian poetry brilliant masters of metaphor were Pavlo Tychyna with his "sunny clarinets" and Bohdan-Ihor Antonych with his mythopoetic vision of nature. Metaphor is the central concept of the theory of tropes.
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Compare “Metaphor” with another term
Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Both are tropes of name-transfer, but by different principles. Metaphor brings objects together by SIMILARITY (a hidden comparison), whereas metonymy works by real CONTIGUITY — a connection in space, time or cause ("drank a glass," "reading Shevchenko"). Metaphor creates a new image from resemblance; metonymy names the whole through a contiguous detail.
