Basics of metaphor and simile

Seamus Cooney

No matter far how one advances in experience, a return to basics is never without benefit.

So first, some definitions:

• Simile:

  "an explicit likening of one thing to another" (Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary ) (1)

  "A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, the comparison being made explicit typically by the use of the introductory 'like' or 'as' ..." (American Heritage Dictionary)

• Metaphor:

  "a figure of speech by which a thing is spoken of as being that which is only resembles, as when a ferocious man is called a tiger" ( Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary )

  "A figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy, as in the phrase 'evening of life.'" (American Heritage Dictionary)

• Similes:

• My love is like a red, red rose ... Robert Burns

• My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ... Shakespeare

• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
  Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Shakespeare

• Helen, thy beauty is to me
  Like those Nicean barks of yore ... Poe

• Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
  She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens ...Ezra Pound

• Like to a Feavers pulse my heart doth beat ... Cavendish

• As virtuous men pass mildly away ...
  So let us part and make no noise ... Donne

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• Metaphors:

  1. Yes! in the sea of life enisled, ...
     We mortal millions live alone.     Arnold

  2. A Sonnet is a moment's monument ...    D. G. Rossetti
     
     
  3. Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee ... Hopkins    
     
     
  4. I taste a liquor never brewed ...
     Inebriate of Air -- am I -- ...    Dickinson

  5. I shall never get you put together entirely
     Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.    Plath

  6. Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
     God's breath in man returning to his birth ...    Herbert

  7. The hour-glass whispers to the lion's paw ...
  If you'd like to read some analysis of these metaphors, click here.