The basic function of figurative language derives from its essential nature. Figurative language is used to present something more vividly to the reader's imagination, and his or her understanding, than would be possible through the use of literal language alone. Its purpose is to bring an idea home to the reader or listener and make it stick in his or her mind. In particular, figurative language aims to bring home something abstract, complex, or unfamiliar by comparing it to something concrete, simple, or familiar to the reader's or listener's experience.In act 1, scene 5 of Macbeth, for instance, when Macbeth returns home for the first time after encountering the witches, Shakespeare could have made Lady Macbeth say to him something to the effect of: "It would be quite obvious to anyone who looked at your face, my thane, that you were preoccupied with thinking about things that you find strange and worrying." That statement is perfectly clear. It is easy to understand, because the language is simple and straightforward, but there is nothing in those plain and, in fact, fairly abstract words that activates the inner eye of the imagination. You can read those words and by an intellectual process note what is being said, but there is nothing in them that, to change the metaphor, reaches out to you in such a way that you can grasp it with more than the neutral intellect. The fact that the statement is neither poetic nor dramatic and makes Lady Macbeth sound like a disinterested observer, which she emphatically is not, is, for our purposes, incidental.Shakespeare was acutely aware that he was presenting a dramatic moment and equally aware that if his words did not hit home immediately the moment would be gone. So he has Lady Macbeth express herself far more pithily and memorably: "Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange matters" (1.5.61–62). Instead of presenting us with such abstract words as "obvious," "preoccupied," "thinking," he gives us a word for a concrete and familiar object, a book. Although a person's face does not greatly resemble an open book, the idea that a people's emotional or mental states can be as easily perceived from their facial expressions as information can be derived from the page is one that almost anyone can respond to immediately. The comparison seems apt, just as it seems apt to equate lack of a normal human response with low temperatures. The image has certainly stuck in the minds of English-speaking people, for we still say that "someone's face is like a book," just as we say that guilt or some other feeling is "written all over someone's face."Shakespeare, then, is using figurative language precisely as it ought to be used—to imprint something in the mind by using the concrete and familiar to represent the abstract and unfamiliar and make the latter easier to visualize and understand. But it is comparatively easy to appreciate figurative use in a great writer, especially a great poet. It is not always so easy to use it in your own writing.
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