The Knight Figurative Language

“The Knight” by Adrienne Rich establishes the conflict between how we, as a society, view people externally versus how people view themselves internally. By using figurative language, including extended metaphor, imagery, and anaphora, Rich imposes the idea of how we shouldn’t expect people to be exactly how we see them. The entire poem is nothing more than an extended metaphor. An extended metaphor is a metaphor that is developed over the course of a body of text. In “The Knight” the speaker compares the knight to people who go through life trying to be brave when they are actually dead on the inside. When you think about a knight, people tend to think of a person in heavy armor who is bold and brave, and ready to fight for the lives of others. What people often fail to remember is that a knight is a person, not a superhero. Knights have feelings and emotions, and feel scared, fearful, and weak just like everyone else. This relates back to the message of the poem, because it reminds us that not everyone's internal feelings match their external looks. The speaker of the poem also uses imagery throughout the …show more content…
Imagery is an appeal to the five senses (touch, taste, sight, smell, sound) to help deepen the reader’s experience of the text. The poem has a a lot of positive imagery in the first stanza involving the knight, including when the knight “ [ … ]rides into the noon, / and his helmet points to the sun, / and a thousand splintered suns / are the gaiety of his mail” and how the knight’s “ [ … ]feet glitter / and his palms flash in reply, / and under his crackling banner / he rides like a ship in sail.” This imagery allows the reader to visualize a strong, brave, fearless knight who wears his armor with pride. The reader might also be led to imagine the knight remaining prideful despite his tiredness and “crackling banner.” In the