"The most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two" (Chris Baldick, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990], p. 134). Got it? Well, no, most of us don't. But we use them every day, often without knowing it. Most clichés began life as metaphors: "surfing the web" mixes two dead metaphors, one from aquatic sport, the other from cloth-making or spidering. And the phrase "began life" compares a verbal expression to a living being. Shakespeare's metaphors, unlike those, can yield suggestions far in excess of any simple prose restatement of the unmetaphorized idea. By putting two or more things (we often call one of them an image) together, the metaphor produces more than the sum of its verbal parts.
In the first sentence of 1 Henry IV, the King says he wants to find "a time for frighted peace to pant." The metaphor makes the abstract "peace" into a person who has been frightened away; he wants peace to stop running, catch its breath, but (we notice) only so it can speak "short-winded[ly]" about new wars. Not much of a metaphor, until we notice that the idea of running after an always-elusive goal appears often in 1 Henry IV, always in slightly different ways, varying and enriching the original metaphor. For a more complex example, see analysis. A sub-catgory of metaphor is simile.
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