Among the artistic means that any author possesses, regardless of the genre in which he writes, a special place is occupied by a metaphor. It allows you to enrich speech and color practically any work in the necessary emotional shades, most accurately convey the image of an object or phenomenon. What is a metaphor? This is the transfer of the properties of one object or phenomenon to another, based on their similarity, that is, something like a comparison, only hidden, without the word “like” and the like, but the reader fully understands that this is a comparison.
This may be the use of the name of one object in order to describe the properties of another. An example is the line from many poetic works, for example, “Pedestrians muzzle the rain sucked” by Mayakovsky - it’s clear that no one sucked the poor citizens, but they just fell in heavy rain, but the image would be very bright and clear - if the author wrote more directly, it would have been much less expressive. Sometimes in order to accurately determine whether a metaphor is an epithet, you need to clearly understand what a metaphor is and what an epithet is, and even this does not always help. First of all, this applies to adjectives, for example, "golden autumn" - the word "golden" here can be considered both as a metaphor and as an epithet.
Also, the images of the heroes of works can carry the functions of a metaphor: in particular, this is inherent in Gorky's works, for example, the image of the mother in the work of the same name. Almost all proverbs and sayings are also important: for example, “for seven nannies, a child without an eye” is applied not only to a rather rare situation when there are seven governesses for one unfortunate child.
To understand what a metaphor is, one can imagine a situation where one person tries for a long and tedious way to explain to another how he sees a particular phenomenon - as we know, this is rather difficult, but in this case you can turn to an expressive image, and then everything will immediately fall into place. That is, the function of the metaphor includes a quick and understandable transfer of emotion or sensation.
In fact, it is not necessary to know what a metaphor is to use it. We are confronted with them not only in highly artistic works. For example, images of dreams are almost always a metaphor, which is why they are one of the first and favorite subjects of study by psychologists and psychiatrists. By the way, these specialists themselves often use metaphors in their work - this helps them find a more subtle approach to patients.
We also: often in everyday life there are situations when it is inappropriate to say something directly, and you have to look for words that convey the desired meaning, but essentially completely different: as we already know, this is also a metaphor.
A metaphor is very widely used in advertising: most advertising slogans are metaphors. In fact, if you take them literally - most often it turns out some kind of nonsense, but, nevertheless, they find a response precisely from those to whom they are addressed, and after all they do not always think what a metaphor is, and especially since it is addressed specifically to them.
Thus, a metaphor is one of the most common linguistic techniques that has long gone beyond the scope of literature and is successfully used by each of us in everyday life. The metaphor allows a person, instead of long and confused explanations, to convey most accurately what he wants to say in any situation. Without this artistic tool, it would be much more difficult to find a response in other hearts not only to poets and writers, but to all of us. This is such a unique thing that helps everyone, regardless of whether they know what a metaphor is.