6.B Metaphor: Tenor, Vehicle and What Transfers (FIG-1.H)

Every metaphor has two parts: the tenor, which is the actual subject, and the vehicle, which is the thing it's compared to. Call a person a fortress and the tenor is the person, the vehicle is the fortress. But a fortress has stone, height, cannons, a flag, a history. None of that transfers. What transfers is something like defendedness, the sense of walls built to keep people out. Reading a metaphor well means asking: of everything the vehicle could mean, which part does this context actually want? A list of adjectives says 'guarded, closed-off, strong' and stops there. The metaphor makes you build that meaning yourself, out of a picture, which is why it lands harder and stays stranger.

Because a metaphor asserts identity instead of resemblance, it can do something a simile can't: it lets the vehicle's verbs attach directly to the tenor. 'The committee was a weather system' doesn't just note a likeness, it lets the committee gather, darken, and move east as if those were literally its actions. Simile holds the comparison at arm's length with 'like' or 'as'; metaphor collapses the distance, so the borrowed behavior reads as the subject's own.

This is also why metaphors aren't static. The context around a metaphor keeps narrowing or expanding what gets pulled across, so a single vehicle can carry different, even opposite, traits as a poem continues, which is part of how a poem's argument turns. That sits right next to the work on where a poem's lines break and where its argument shifts: a metaphor often marks or drives exactly that turn.