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Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Key Examples in The Poisonwood Bible
Book 1, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Picture the Forest:
In the highly descriptive opening of Book 1, Orleanna describes the Congolese jungle with imagery, similes, personification, and metaphor. This figurative language in the following passage forms a motif that will recur throughout the book: a living, personified land that reminds readers of Africa's unique environment, culture, history, and future.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
Book 1, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Garden Graves:
In Book 1, Leah and Nathan start a garden, but Mama Tataba insists their method of planting will be ineffective. She reshapes their garden in an attempt to help them, and Leah describes the result with metaphors and similes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Right after prayers I went out to check the progress of our garden, and was stunned to see what Mama Tataba had meant by hills: to me they looked like graves, as wide and long as a regular dead human. She had reshaped our garden overnight into eight neat burial mounds. I fetched my father, who came walking fast as if I’d discovered a viper he meant to behead. My father by then was in a paroxysm of exasperation. He squinted long and hard with his bad eye, to make out the fix our garden was in. Then the two of us together, without a word passing between us, leveled it out again as flat as the Great Plains.
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Book 2, Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis—Father of Fish Bait:
In Book 2, Orleanna describes Nathan's understanding of Christianity with metaphors, similes, and irony that highlight her confusions about his faith:
Unlock with LitCharts A+But Nathan wouldn’t hear my worries. For him, our life was as simple as paying in cash and sticking the receipt in your breast pocket: we had the Lord’s protection, he said, because we came to Africa in His service. Yet we sang in church “Tata Nzolo”! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment.
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Book 2, Chapter 21
Explanation and Analysis—Disease:
In Book 2, children and babies in Kilanga begin falling seriously ill. Adah describes their deaths with a metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They are all dying. Dying from kakakaka, the disease that turns the body to a small black pitcher, pitches it over, and pours out all its liquid insides.
Book 3, Chapter 26
Explanation and Analysis—No Wings:
In Book 3, Orleanna describes her childhood and eventual marriage to Nathan. As the reader already knows from the rest of the novel, Nathan has treated Orleanna poorly. As if to defend or explain her choices (perhaps to the reader or to Ruth May), Orleanna uses metaphor, personification, and simple to describe why she put up with Nathan's behavior for so long:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Like Methuselah I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found, like Methuselah, I had no wings. This is why, little beast. I’d lost my wings. Don’t ask me how I gained them back—the story is too unbearable. I trusted too long in false reassurances, believing as we all want to do when men speak of the national interest, that it’s also ours. In the end, my lot was cast with the Congo. Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.
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Book 3, Chapter 33
Explanation and Analysis—Follow in His Footsteps:
In Book 3, Leah's relationship to her father, Nathan, begins to change. She describes her futile efforts to please him with two metaphors.
Unlock with LitCharts A+All my life I’ve tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints, believing if only I stayed close enough to him those same clean, simple laws would rule my life as well. That the Lord would see my goodness and fill me with light. Yet with each passing day I find myself farther away. There’s a great holy war going on in my father’s mind, in which we’re meant to duck and run and obey orders and fight for all the right things, but I can’t always make out the orders or even tell which side I am on exactly. I’m not even allowed to carry a gun. I’m a girl. He has no inkling.
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Book 3, Chapter 34
Explanation and Analysis—Root and Graft:
In Book 3, Brother Fowles returns to Kilanga with his wife for a short visit. He meets the Prices, and it doesn't take long for Nathan and Fowles to get into a spirited disagreement about Christianity, replete with biblical quotes, allusions, and interpretations. In order to challenge Nathan's condescending attitude toward the Congolese villagers, Fowles takes up a metaphor from the Bible and expands it:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Take for example your Romans, chapter ten. Let’s go back to that. The American Translation, if you prefer. A little farther on we find this promise: ‘If the first handful of dough is consecrated, the whole mass is, and if the root of a tree is consecrated, so are its branches. If some of the branches have been broken off, and you who were only a wild olive shoot have been grafted in, and made to share the richness of the olive’s root, you must not look down upon the branches. Remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.' […] Do you get the notion we are the branch that’s grafted on here, sharing in the richness of these African roots?
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Book 3, Chapter 41
Explanation and Analysis—Permanent as a Heartbeat:
In Book 3, Leah and Anatole once again talk about the differences between the Congo and the United States. Leah describes the jungle and compares the Congo's natural environment that of the United States using metaphors, similes, and imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I stared at the edge of the clearing behind us, where the jungle closed us out with its great green wall of trees, bird calls, animals breathing, all as permanent as a heartbeat we heard in our sleep. Surrounding us was a thick, wet, living stand of trees and tall grasses stretching all the way across Congo. And we were nothing but little mice squirming through it in our dark little pathways. In Congo, it seems the land owns the people. How could I explain to Anatole about soybean fields where men sat in huge tractors like kings on thrones, taming the soil from one horizon to the other? It seemed like a memory trick or a bluegreen dream: impossible.
Book 3, Chapter 44
Explanation and Analysis—Ants:
In Book 3, Leah describes her first sight of the ant swarm with similes, metaphors, and imagery.
Unlock with LitCharts A+Ants. We were walking on, surrounded, enclosed, enveloped, being eaten by ants. Every surface was covered and boiling, and the path like black flowing lava in the moonlight. Dark, bulbous tree trunks seethed and bulged. The grass had become a field of dark daggers standing upright, churning and crumpling in on themselves. We walked on ants and ran on them, releasing their vinegary smell to the weird, quiet night.
Book 4, Chapter 49
Explanation and Analysis—Sacrificial Pawns:
Book 4 opens with an extended metaphor and simile that explain the history of the Congo. In part through a chess metaphor, Orleanna relates to the reader the Belgian Congo's attempts to achieve self-government and independence, which more powerful nations such as the United States and Belgium undermined:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Languidly they bring their map to order. Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger—Ngoma, Mukenge, Mulele, Kasavubu, Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.
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Book 4, Chapter 52
Explanation and Analysis—Hunting:
In Book 4, Adah describes the climax of the animal hunt with imagery, metaphors, and personification.
Unlock with LitCharts A+As the ring burned smaller we suddenly caught sight of its other side, the red-orange tongues and black ash closing in. The looming shapes of animals bunched up inside: antelopes, bushbucks, broad-headed warthogs with warthog children running behind them. A troop of baboons ran with arched tails flying as they zigzagged, not yet understanding their entrapment. Thousands of insects beat the air to a pulpy soup of animal panic.
Book 4, Chapter 59
Explanation and Analysis—Birth and Death:
In Book 4, Adah reflects on Ruth May's death with imagery and metaphors.
Unlock with LitCharts A+I was not present at Ruth May’s birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby’s first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living.
Book 5, Chapter 68
Explanation and Analysis—The Price of a Life:
In Book 5, Leah describes the Congolese reaction to Mobutu's corrupt and inept rule. She uses metaphor and simile to explain that no one powerful cares when Congolese people die, and that only white people's lives will be protected:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They know who stands behind Mobutu, and that in some place as far away as heaven, where the largest rules are made, white and black lives are different kinds of currencies. When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant’s hand, and still not purchase a single banana.
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Book 6, Chapter 77
Explanation and Analysis—The Land Howls:
In Book 6, Leah uses multiple literary devices (metaphor, simile, personification, imagery, and idiom) to explain the natural environment of the Congo and the unique farming techniques it requires:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Clearing a rain forest to plant annuals is like stripping an animal first of its fur, then its skin. The land howls. Annual crops fly on a wing and a prayer. And even if you manage to get a harvest, why, you need roads to take it out! Take one trip overland here and you’ll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream. The soil falls apart. The earth melts into red gashes like the mouths of whales. Fungi and vines throw a blanket over the face of the dead land. It’s simple, really. Central Africa is a rowdy society of flora and fauna that have managed to balance together on a trembling geologic plate for ten million years: when you clear off part of the plate, the whole slides into ruin.
Book 7
Explanation and Analysis—New Life:
In Book 7, the reader gets a glimpse into a hopeful future for the Congo. Mobutu, stricken with cancer, has given up his dictatorship of the Congo, and an unknown narrator describes the hope this fresh start inspires with metaphorical language and personification:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests. The eyes in the trees are watching. The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats.
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