[1] When we talk, sometimes we say things directly I'm going to the store, I'll be back in five minutes. Other times though, we talk in a way that conjures up a small scene. It's raining cats and dogs out, we say, or I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[2] Metaphors are a way to talk about one thing by describing something else. That may seem roundabout, but it's not. Seeing and hearing and tasting are how we know anything first. The philosopher William James described the world of newborn infants as a buzzing and blooming confusion. Abstract ideas are pale things compared to those first bees and blossoms.

[3] Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind. A metaphor isn't true or untrue in any ordinary sense. Metaphors are art, not science, but they can still feel right or wrong. A metaphor that isn't good leaves you confused. You know what it means to feel like a square wheel, but not what it's like to be tired as a whale.

[4] There's a paradox to metaphors. They almost always say things that aren't true. If you say, there's an elephant in the room, there isn't an actual one, looking for the peanut dish on the table.

[5] Some metaphors include the words like or as. Sweet as honey, strong as a tree. Those are called similes. A simile is a metaphor that admits it's making a comparison. Similes tend to make you think. Metaphors let you feel things directly. Take Shakespeare's famous metaphor, All the world's a stage. The world is like a stage just seems thinner, and more boring.

[6] Sometimes a poem takes a metaphor and extends it, building on one idea in many ways. Here's the beginning of Langston Hughes' famous poem Mother to Son. Well, son, I'll tell you. Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, and splinters, and boards torn up, and places with no carpet on the floor. He is making a metaphor that compares a hard life to a wrecked house you still have to live in. Those splinters and tacks feel real; they hurt your own feet and your own heart. However, the mother is describing her life here, not her actual house. And hunger, and cold, exhausting work and poverty are what's also inside those splinters.

[7] A good metaphor isn't a puzzle, or a way to convey hidden meanings; it's a way to let you feel and know something differently. Metaphors give words a way to go beyond their own meaning. They're handles on the door of what we can know, and of what we can imagine. Each door leads to some new house, and some new world that only that one handle can open. What's amazing is this: by making a handle, you can make a world.