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You’re probably used to thinking about metaphors and similes as poetic tools, but, like other kinds of figurative language, they can serve as a rhetorical strategy to give an idea more impact. Figurative language appeals to our emotions and helps us to understand a different perspective. In the opening to her essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” Jamaica Kincaid uses figurative language to help us understand the feelings of a young girl in the Caribbean toward the “mother country” of England.

When I was in school for the first time, I was a child in school sitting at a desk. The England I was looking at was laid out on a map gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel; it lay on a bed of sky blue—the background of the map—its yellow form mysterious, because though it looked like a leg of mutton, it could not really look like anything so familiar as a leg of mutton because it was England—with shadings of pink and green, unlike any shadings of pink and green I had seen before, squiggly veins of red running in every direction. England was a special jewel all right, and only special people got to wear it.

By comparing England to a jewel, then a leg of mutton (sheep), and then again a jewel, Kincaid gives us a sense of her mixed emotions. As she lets us in on her thought process of why England “could not really look like anything so familiar as a leg of mutton,” we also begin to hear the sarcasm in her attitude toward the place.

Not all figurative language has to be as lyrical as in Kincaid’s example, however. Note that in his speech on the evening of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush—known for his practical and straightforward language — used one brief but effective figure of speech. He warned the enemies of the United States: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”