Metaphor & Figuration
Simile
A comparison marked with like or as. The marker keeps both things visible, so the reader can test the resemblance. Similes can be more extreme than metaphors because the grammar admits they are comparisons.
"My love is like a red, red rose." — Burns
Don't confuse it with Metaphor. Drop the 'like' and it becomes metaphor. An epic simile extends the comparison over many lines with its own internal scene.
In the Reader — 21 excerpts
I wandered lonely as a cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks …
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of …
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
…to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.
Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being. She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of August is sultry.
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
A sound is heard that seems to come from the sky, like a breaking harp-string, dying away mournfully.
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Like a patient etherized upon a table
flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding
…When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
…talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
In which I have lived like a foot
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antique and diffuse and the wholes thereof were scattered like paper in the wind.
Travels with
Devices that share a passage with simile most often — company reveals character.
Anaphora 8 Parataxis 7 Personification 7 Metaphor 6 Asyndeton 5 Apposition / Appositive 5 Passive Voice 4 Antithesis 4
The rest of the family
Metaphor Catachresis Metonymy Synecdoche Personification Prosopopoeia Pathetic Fallacy Transferred Epithet / Hypallage Metalepsis Symbol Allusion Mythopoesis