These lines could be used to illustrate both metaphor's syntactic complexity and the idea of extended metaphor, but I shall con fi ne my remarks to the single metaphor that fi gures in the last line (though we need the fi rst three lines to appreciate the subject or subjects of this metaphor). What I suggest is that even before we spend time on further elucidation and commentary, we have no trouble in recognizing that there is a kind of depth to this metaphor. Using the ruined choirs of a church to characterize trees in autumn (when these have already been used to characterize a stage in human life) calls on signi fi cances that perhaps could be articulated (by someone other than me) but which reach deeply into, dare I say, our collective psyche. One can see depth here, without necessarily seeing into it. The following is an example of the second general sort of metaphor described above:Life is a dance fl oor,God is a DJ. 170 This metaphor requires (or presumes) fairly straightforward empirical knowledge: we need to know something about clubbing, and the loud, incessant music — controlled by the DJ — which dictates in some indirect sense the swirling movements of the clubbers on the dance fl oor. The metaphor here is certainly vivid, but it isn't deep. It is usual to think that depth and vividness in metaphors go together, and it is certainly possible for a single metaphor to possess both features, but I am suggesting that, in calling on different resources, they are separable. Those we regard as vivid tend to make greater calls on the process of semantic descent; we are led by the words in the metaphor to some quite speci fi c object, thereby leaving little room for doubt about its quali fi cational potential. In contrast, in those metaphors which tend to have depth, descent to an object, even descent controlled in certain ways by the words in the metaphor, still leaves a lot to be done. We know that Romeo uses that most prominent of objects in our sky to characterize Juliet, but there must be a sharing of the signi fi cance of that object before there can be anything like attunement in this characterization.