Word: metaphoritis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...West is a standard horse epic in which the Oregon trail is a metaphor for life and the people in the wagon train are symbolic of mankind. Adapted from a novel by A. B. Guthrie Jr., the film has somehow lost the earthy realism of the book, and has become merely a landlocked ship of fools. Among the passengers are a flint-eyed scout (Robert Mitchum), a pioneering couple (Richard Widmark and Lola Albright), a frightened newlywed who alternately freezes and teases her husband, a Negro slave-not to mention a crowd of teenagers, old folks and other essentials...
More often, Agnon transcends the Orthodoxy of his material. In The Bridal Canopy, the Hasid Reb Yudel Nathanson, a deliberately quixotic hero, half saint, half shlemiel, sets out to beg a dowry for his daughters. The book is one long metaphor for the wandering Jew, but Agnon heroes have a disconcerting universality. "A difficult thing to grasp," says Reb Yudel, pondering war. "What satisfaction do the kings derive in sending folk of this countryside to another land and folk of another land to this countryside? What difference does it make to the Angel of Death whether he has to come...
...trochees alternating with rising lambs is important for the poem's mixture of moods. Mr.Lowell substitutes a more regular series of five-stress lines, but supplies energy and excitement with repetition, and improves in at least one passage of typically Horatian philosophy by turning a flat statement into a metaphor...
...life; the heat of it was so great he was afraid it would melt his ears, ignite his hair and burn the top of his head off." His gift for simile: "Grant suddenly felt amiable again, like a man who has just been relieved of a serious constipation." Metaphor: "I want to know what makes the wellsprings of human character tick...
...first time, sir." Here the playwright opens the play to the book of life itself. Life is always "only the first time" for every man, and, for all its late and early joys, he pays with a hundred trials and a hundred deaths. Hamp's death is a metaphor, not only for death in war but for death in the undeclared war of life...