Metaphor

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Unti­tled

Pen in hand,
I tend a gar­den of lan­guage,
weed out words of hate and divi­sion,
plant heal­ing nouns, verbs, adjec­tives
burst­ing with col­or,
and water them all with my tears.
Before you know it,
metaphors bloom with mean­ing.

© 2017 by Nik­ki Grimes

Metaphor is my absolute favorite poet­ic device of all. I have always rel­ished the idea of paint­ing a pic­ture with words, and that’s pre­cise­ly what metaphor is all about!

A poem about rain­bows cries out for metaphor! This prompt is a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to prac­tice one of the most com­mon devices poets rely on. To my mind, it is at the heart of all poet­ry, because it is the idea of paint­ing with words. Metaphor is a cel­e­bra­tion of the imag­i­na­tion! Note: This is not the time to wor­ry about accu­rate spelling, or per­fect gram­mar. (Pre­cious few authors — even award-win­ning ones — can lay claim to both, in case you won­dered.) Pris­tine spelling and good gram­mar are worth­while, but they are lessons for anoth­er day. This is an exer­cise of the imag­i­na­tion. In oth­er words, let it rip!

Mentor Texts: Early Elementary

What Would You Do with a Rain­bow?
by Nik­ki Grimes

If you had a rain­bow,
what would you do?
Would you weave its col­ors
through your hair?
Would you wrap its band
around your waist?
Would you stir it in milk,
and take a sip?
Me, I’d draw that rain­bow
with crayons galore,
then write it a poem.
That’s what rain­bows are for!

— © 2026 by Nik­ki Grimes

Poetic Device: Metaphor

  1. Share and dis­cuss the men­tor text with your stu­dents.
  2. Talk a lit­tle bit about what a rain­bow is. Keep it sim­ple. Don’t go too deeply into the sci­ence. This isn’t a sci­ence les­son. (Although you might work this into an exten­sion.) This is a poet­ry prac­tice.
  3. Ask stu­dents to close their eyes and pre­tend the rain­bow is some­thing they could grab out of the sky and use any­way they want­ed to.
  4. Ask: What would you do with a rain­bow, if you could?
  5. Give them maybe five min­utes to think about the ques­tion and write down as many answers as they can come up with.
  6. Help them divide each thought into a line or two of its own. These lines will form the basis of their poem.

Poetic Device: Metaphor

  1. Take a moment to explain what a metaphor is, then point out the metaphors in the men­tor text. Fol­low this up with a few more exam­ples.
  2. Invite stu­dents to try to go back over the sen­tences they’ve writ­ten and add two or three metaphors to those lines. If they man­age more than that, great! If not, that’s okay. Two or three metaphors are a won­der­ful start. The next time around, they’ll be able to do more.
  3. Invite a few stu­dents to share their metaphors aloud, but don’t push. We want this to be fun, not stress­ful. Nev­er force the issue.

Key­words: Metaphor, Rain­bow

Exten­sion Activ­i­ty: Have stu­dents illus­trate their rain­bow metaphors.

Think about doing a card-mak­ing project in which stu­dents can use their fin­ished poems as part of the card’s design.

Mentor Texts: Middle Grade

This week’s guest poet prompt for mid­dle grade stu­dents, on Metaphor, comes from Charles Ghigna, aka Father Goose. He offers four exam­ples. Here is the first:

Text#1
How to Build a Poem
by Charles Ghigna

Let’s build a poem
made of rhyme
with words like lad­ders
we can climb,
with words that like
to take their time,

words that ham­mer,
words that nail,
words that saw,
words that sail,
words that whis­per,
words that wail,

words that open
win­dow door,
words that sing,
words that soar,
words that leave us
want­i­ng more.

— from The Father Goose Trea­sury of Poet­ry, Schif­fer Kids, 2023, reprint­ed here with per­mis­sion from Charles Ghigna.

  1. Share and dis­cuss the first men­tor text.
  2. Share and dis­cuss Ghig­na’s descrip­tion of metaphors.

“Clouds are pop­corn. Lakes are mir­rors. Snowflakes are but­ter­flies dressed all in white. Shad­ows are best friends who come out at night.” Those are metaphors. Metaphors are com­par­isons. Think­ing up metaphors is fun. It’s mag­ic! In fact, the phrase ‘metaphors are mag­ic’ is a metaphor!

When you use a metaphor to devel­op an idea or scene through a poem or sto­ry, it is called an extend­ed metaphor. I often like to use extend­ed metaphors to hold the inter­est of my read­ers as they make their way into and through my poems. Like a good tour guide, an extend­ed metaphor pro­vides the read­er with a lit­tle path to ‘show, rather than tell’ what the jour­ney is all about.

Along the way, I like to add images that relate to the extend­ed metaphor. Those added images help pro­vide inter­est to the path and clar­i­ty to the jour­ney, much like one who expe­ri­ences the trees, flow­ers, birds, bees, and but­ter­flies along their stroll through a path in the woods.”

Key­words: Metaphor, Extend­ed Metaphor, Father Goose

Guest Poet Bio

Charles Ghigna Father Goose
Charles Ghigna
Father Goose Treasury of Poetry
The Father Goose Trea­sury of Poet­ry

Charles Ghigna Father Goose ® lives in a tree house in the mid­dle of Alaba­ma. He is a poet, chil­dren’s author, and nation­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed fea­ture writer with more than one hun­dred books pub­lished by Ran­dom House, Dis­ney, Scholas­tic, and Simon & Schus­ter, from the Pulitzer Prize nom­i­nee Return­ing to Earth to the pop­u­lar chil­dren’s books The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar’s First Poems illus­trat­ed by Eric Car­le and The Father Goose Trea­sury of Poet­ry for Chil­dren.

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