Breaking Down the Figurative Devices in One of Rock's Most Analyzed Songs
Bohemian Rhapsody runs roughly six minutes and uses nearly every figurative device a songwriter could reach for. The ballad section opens with "Mama, just killed a man" which functions as both literal narration and a metaphor for destroying one's former identity. That ambiguity is deliberate. Mercury never confirms whether the killing is real or symbolic. The rest of the song pivots around that uncertainty. The operatic middle section is where the figurative density spikes. Galileo, Figaro, and Magnifico are not random names dropped for rhyme. Galileo references the astronomer whose heliocentric model challenged religious authority. Figaro comes from the Beaumarchais plays and Mozart's opera, representing a clever commoner who outwits the aristocracy. Magnifico means "great" in Italian and appears to function as an ironic title, possibly mocking religious or institutional grandeur. The line "Bismillah! Bismillah!" invokes Arabic for "in the name of God," placing a theological weight right beside comedic opera references. That collision is the point. The song also relies heavily on imagery. "Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?" pulls from Commedia dell'arte, where Scaramouche is a boastful, cowardly character. The fandango is a lively Spanish dance. So you get a figure who is supposedly brave being asked to perform something physically demanding. It works as dramatic irony layered on top of the wider theme of performance and judgment running through the entire piece.
Simile and metaphor appear throughout but more subtly. "Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me" uses simile-adjacent imagery without an explicit "like" or "as." The natural forces here stand in for internal turmoil rather than describing actual weather. That personification of fear through elemental force is a standard technique but it lands differently because the song treats it with full operatic seriousness. One thing most analyses miss is how the guitar solo functions as figurative language without words. The Brian May solo that bridges the ballad and operatic sections operates as emotional punctuation. It is not merely a transition. The phrasing mimics speech patterns, rising and falling like someone trying to articulate something they cannot verbalize. In practice, if you are analyzing this song for a paper or presentation, treating that solo as silence rather than music will make your argument weaker. I ran into a specific problem once when trying to map every metaphor in the song to a single coherent interpretation. Someone had argued that the entire song is about Mercury coming to terms with his sexuality, reading every character and reference through that lens. It is a defensible approach but it collapses when you hit the Beelzebub section. "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me" pulls in explicitly Christian demonology. If you force everything back to one biographical reading, the religious framework becomes awkward and some lines lose their texture. The workaround I used was to treat the song as operating on two simultaneous levels: personal confession and mythological drama. Neither level cancels the other out. They feed each other.
The hard rock section at the end introduces another figurative layer. "Any way the wind blows" functions as thematic resolution. After six minutes of internal debate, condemnation, and theatrical chaos, the narrator simply accepts whatever comes. It is not hope exactly. It is resignation dressed as freedom. The metaphor works because the preceding chaos makes that calm feel earned rather than dismissive. A common pitfall when discussing this song is treating the figurative language as purely decorative. It is structural. Every device serves the arc from confession to trial to acceptance. Remove the Galileo reference and you lose the scientific heresy angle that parallels the narrator's sense of having broken an irredeemable rule. Remove Scaramouche and you lose the theatrical judgment frame. The song is built so that each figurative choice locks into the next one. If you want to study this material further, the official song lyrics are widely available through licensed publishers. The Mercury archives at the British Library hold some manuscript drafts that show how the operatic section evolved during composition. Those drafts are publicly accessible and they reveal that some of the more obscure references were added late in the writing process, which supports the argument that the figurative density was intentional rather than accidental.
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The main limitation of deep figurative analysis here is that Mercury was deliberately opaque. He reportedly gave contradictory explanations about the song's meaning at different points. Any interpretation you build will have blind spots. That is not a flaw in the analysis. It is a feature of the source material. The song works precisely because it refuses to settle on one reading. For practical purposes, the most useful figurative devices to focus on are the mythological allusions, the theatrical references, and the central murder metaphor. Those three threads carry the most analytical weight and they connect to each other more directly than the secondary imagery. Everything else enriches the texture but does not change the structural argument of the song.
