There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The right word, or for this sentence, the right verb, can make all the difference. Woolf uses a verb that serves as a metaphor. She could have written, “She stood at the curb, never seeing him…” But the verb ‘perched’ hauls up the image of a bird. Mrs. Dalloway becomes birdlike.
To write fresh, original metaphors, begin to think of the world as domains: the vegetable domain, the human domain, machines, animals, herbs, fruit, sea creatures, on and on. Compelling metaphors combine two domains that we don’t usually think have anything in common.
X=Human, Mrs. Dalloway
Y=bird
To take the big view (as my 10-year-old son says, ‘big brain’ view), you are showing the hidden connections between an intertwined, interconnected world. You’re waking up the reader to this woven world.
Instructions (folded neatly in a square)
OK. Back to the making of this sentence. It’s a cumulative sentence, with the independent clause at the beginning, with the subject “She” and the verb “perched.”
To make us stay there and really see Mrs. Dalloway perched, Woolf includes three modifying phrases,
“never seeing him,”
“waiting to cross,”
“very upright.”
After you find your verb metaphor, add three modifying phrases. These are “free modifying phrases,” which means they can move around freely.
She could have written:
Never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright, there she perched.
That’s called a left-branching sentence with all the modifiers located to the left of the base clause (also called independent clause).
James Woods in How Fiction Works says, “Metaphor is analogous to fiction because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. It gives us a sense of something newly painted for us to see.”
And here’s Aristotle: “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”
OK, your turn to be a genius.
Thank you so much for these lessons!
He slithered around dark corners, through invisible obstacles, avoiding detection.
Entering the room her face ripened, seeing the mural brimming with colours, tantalising to touch, quite intense.