Conceit

Conceit Definition
Conceit is a figure of speech in which vastly different gadgets are likened together with the assist of similes or metaphors.

Conceit develops a evaluation which is relatively not going but is, nonetheless, intellectually imaginative. A evaluation becomes an arrogance when the writer attempts to make us admit a similarity between matters of whose unlikeness we are strongly conscious. For this purpose, conceits are regularly surprising.

For instance, it will not wonder us to hear someone saying, “You are a snail,” or “You are as slow as a snail,” as we apprehend that the similarity is drawn on a common best of slowness. However, we will truly be surprised to hear a person evaluating “two enthusiasts with the legs of a draftsman’s compass.” Thus, conceit examples have a surprising or shocking effect on the readers because they're novel comparisons, not like the traditional comparisons made in similes and metaphors.

Conceits in Everyday Life
In everyday life, we are able to wonder and amuse others by using the usage of conceits like “Love is like an oil change,” or “The broken coronary heart is a broken china pot.” In those examples, the try and compare two especially unrelated objects makes the comparisons conceits. Conceits in real life may give complicated thoughts and feelings an air of simplicity, by way of comparing them to simple day-to-day objects, as in “My life is sort of a unfastened on line game, people appear to be playing with it.”

Examples of Conceit in Literature
Let us examine a few examples of conceit in literature:

Example #1: Romeo and Juliet (By William Shakespeare)
William Shakespeare uses an arrogance in Act 3, Scene five of his play Romeo and Juliet. Here, Capulet involves Juliet’s room after Romeo has left. He reveals her weeping and says:

“Thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind;
For nevertheless thy eyes, which I can also call the sea,
Do ebb and drift with tears; the bark thy body is,
Sailing on this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs;
Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,
Without a sudden calm, will overset
Thy tempest-tossed frame.”

He compares Juliet to a ship in a storm. The comparison is an prolonged metaphor wherein he compares her eyes to a sea, her tears to a storm, her sighs to the stormy winds, and her frame to a boat in a storm.

Example #2: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (By John Donne)
The term conceit usually brings to thoughts positive examples from metaphysical poets of the 17th century. Of those, John Donne stands out because the exceptional exponent of the use of metaphysical conceits. John Donne, in his poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, says:

“If they be two, they are two so As stiff
Twin compasses are ;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, however doth, if th’ different do.

And although it within the center sit,
Yet, when the opposite far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.”

This is one among Donne’s maximum imaginitive conceits. He compares his and his beloved’s souls with the two legs of a drafting compass. He compares her soul to the constant foot, and his to the opposite foot. He says the bodies of lovers can be separate like the legs of a compass, but are constantly joined at the pinnacle that reminds us of the spiritual union of the two fanatics.

Example #3: The Flea (By John Donne)
We find another striking example of conceit in John Donne’s poem, The Flea:

“Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea greater than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-mattress and marriage-temple is…”

In the above lines, the poet tells his darling that she has no purpose to disclaim him sexually, because the flea has sucked blood from both of them, and their blood has mingled in its gut, so the flea has emerge as their “marriage bed,” though they may be now not married yet.

Function of Conceit
Because conceits make unusual and not likely comparisons between matters, they allow readers to observe matters in a brand new way. Similes and metaphors may explain things vibrantly, but they tend to turn out to be dull at times due to their predictable nature. Conceits, on the opposite hand, surprise and surprise readers with the aid of making farfetched comparisons. Hence, conceit is used as a device in literature to develop interest in readers.

Zoomorphism Concession