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Analyzing figurative language goes beyond identifying metaphors and similes to examining what those comparisons accomplish. A metaphor reveals character perspective, advances theme, or signals tonal shift. Close reading of figurative language means asking what the specific comparison conveys and why the author chose that image over alternatives.
Isolate a figurative phrase and note what two things are being compared. Then ask: what qualities does this comparison emphasize? What does it reveal about the speaker's worldview? How would a different comparison change the effect? Look for figurative language clusters—when multiple comparisons reinforce each other, they often signal thematic importance.
You already know the major categories of figurative language — metaphor, simile, personification, synecdoche — from your earlier work. You also know from close reading techniques that language choices are never accidental; every word in a crafted text is available for analysis. Putting these together means treating figurative language not as decoration but as argument. A metaphor is a claim about the world: it asserts that two things are sufficiently alike that understanding one illuminates the other. The analyst's job is to examine what that claim implies.
Start with the tenor and vehicle of any metaphor. The tenor is what is being described; the vehicle is what it's being compared to. When Sylvia Plath writes that dying is "an art, like everything else," the tenor (dying) inherits all the connotations of the vehicle (art-making): difficulty, craft, deliberateness, the possibility of doing it well or badly, an implied audience. That inherited meaning is specific — another vehicle would produce different implications. Comparing dying to falling asleep, or to finishing a book, or to paying a debt would each carry a different constellation of associations. The analyst asks: of all possible comparisons, why this one? What does the choice tell us about how the speaker conceives of what they're describing?
Look for figurative language that clusters around the same underlying comparison. When multiple metaphors in a text all draw from the same domain — say, repeatedly comparing romantic love to financial transactions, or military conquest — that extended metaphor is doing thematic work. It is not coincidental repetition; it is an argument that the two domains are structurally related. Identifying that underlying argument is central to thematic analysis. Sometimes the author endorses the implied comparison; sometimes the text uses the metaphor to critique exactly the kind of thinking the metaphor embodies.
Finally, pay attention to figurative language at moments of tonal or narrative stress — at a scene's climax, at a character's breaking point, at the poem's turn. These are the moments where literal language feels insufficient, and where the author reaches for comparison to convey what cannot otherwise be said. The figurative choice at these high-pressure moments often encodes the text's deepest commitments. When Hamlet says the world is "an unweeded garden" — at his most despairing — the image reveals what his despair is actually about: not tragedy but a vision of entropy, neglect, and the failure of cultivation. Reading that image closely rather than paraphrasing past it is what close reading of figurative language looks like in practice.
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