Simile
SIMILE. A comparison of one thing with another, explicitly announced by the word “like” or “as.”
Aristotle granted that good similes “give an effect of brilliance,” but preferred metaphor to simile because s., being longer, was less attractive, and because the s. “does not say outright that ‘this’ is ‘that’ ... the hearer is less interested in the idea.” (Rhetoric 1410a). As a figure of speech, s. merges with and to some extent overlaps the “prosaic” metaphor of comparison, substitution, or description, differing from it only by the presence of “like” or “as” (see e.g. Rhetoric 1406a, 1410a). Not every s. is a metaphor, though some similes can be compressed or converted into metaphors; and only some metaphors can be expanded into similes. At the level of comparison, substitution, or description it is useful to preserve the formal distinction between “metaphor-form” and “simile-form,” and to apply the term “submerged s.” to figures of metaphor-form which are in fact similes with the word “like” or “as” omitted. For example, “Thou Moon beyond the clouds! ... Thou Star above the Storm!” is a submerged s. (Many of the more vigorous submerged similes are of the 4-term analogical type A is to X as B is to Y [e.g. “a poisonous resentment”] and are in their origins at least truly metaphorical.) On the other hand, some figures in s.-form may be converted into genuine metaphor, usually by the resonance of the context.
Dull brown a cloak enwraps, Don Juan,
Both thy lean shanks, one arm,
That old bird-cage thy breast, where like magpie
Thy heart hopped on alarm.
Whereas metaphor is a mode of condensation and compression, s. through its descriptive function readily leads to diffuseness and extension, even to the digressive development of the figurative scene, action, or object as an object of beauty in itself. Homer’s brief similes (e.g. Thetis rises out of the sea like a mist, Apollo descends like the night, “And with them followed a cloud of foot-soldiers”) suggest clearly their origin in metaphor; for, although comparison is explicitly indicated by the word “like” or “as,” the two things are not primarily compared but identified, yet without any loss of individual character. Such a use of the metaphor in s.-form may be a natural mark of young and vital speech. (See Bowra, Tradition and Design.) Indeed Chaucer’s characteristic brief similes are of this kind: “hir eyen greye as glas,” “His eyen twynkled in his heed aryght, / As doon the sterres in the frosty nyght.” Such similes are also found in Old Fr. romance. But W. P. Ker has pointed out that “similes are not used much in English poetry before Chaucer, or in medieval vernacular poetry before Dante”; that similes, though commonly used by medieval L. writers, are uncommon in Old Eng. and Old Icelandic (Form and Style, p. 253).
The true epic s. involves the comparison of one composite action or relation with another composite action or relation. For example, in Iliad 4.275 the Gr. host led by Ajax is compared to a storm-cloud: “As when a goatherd looks out from a watch-tower of a hill over the sea, and sees a cloud coming afar off over the sea, carrying with it much tempest, showing to him blacker than pitch, coming on driven by the west wind, and he shudders to see it, and drives his flock into a cave, so appeared the march of the Greek warriors.” It is to Homer’s epic s. that the whole European tradition of extended s. may be traced. In Homer too is to be found an insistently digressive tendency in s. The example cited above has a double reference (for more complex relations see e.g. Iliad 13.271-76, 586); but his aim is usually to provide some single common characteristic in the comparison. His favorite source of material for similes is his direct observation of the life around him; he will sometimes, from delight in the material, follow his fancy and develop the picture without much care for the initial comparison (e.g. Iliad 4.141-45, 12.278-86). Homer uses his similes for a variety of purposes: for relief, suspense, decoration, magnificence. The Homeric similes - striking, various, self-contained, if not always completely apposite - seldom fail to heighten the narrative and to give pleasure for their own sake.
In succession, Virgil and Dante refined the epic s. in order to develop with precision a multiplicity of comparisons within a single extensive image or action, to “make us see more definitely the scene” (T. S. Eliot, Dante, p. 24). This process reaches its culmination in Milton who, as Newton noticed, surpassed all his predecessors in the matter of consistency. Historically, the process may be seen as a process of degeneration from metaphor in the direction of descriptive and logical consistency; from the specifically poetic mode to a discursive mode; from the simple vivid s.-form metaphor discernible in Homer to an extended comparison through imagery, the success of which depends upon the multiplicity and precision of logical, actual, and visual correspondence. (This, in Coleridgean terms, could be described as a movement from Imagination to Fancy.) Homer’s success in s. often depends upon violent heterogeneity between the elements of s. – a practice implicitly commended by Quintilian: “The more remote the simile is from the subject to which it is applied, the greater will be the impression of novelty and the unexpected which it produces” (Institutio Oratoria 8.3.74; cf. Johnson’s dictum: “A simile may be compared to lines converging at a point, and is more excellent as the lines approach from a greater distance”). This striking heterogeneity, often found also in Virgil, may be taken as a mark of the origin of s. in metaphor, being a kind of parataxis or “confrontation” (see METAPHOR). Milton, on the other hand, avoids digressive tendencies in his choice of illustrative material, and chooses his imagery with an almost mathematical subtlety to secure a delicate and complex consistency of internal relations. The organic correspondence of many of Milton’s similes with their context and with the whole poem, their exquisite finish, and relentless logical and imaginative consistency, carry them paradoxically out of the field of discursive comparison toward the field of identity and of metaphor, e.g., Paradise Lost 3.431-41:
As when a Vultur on Imaus bred,
Whose snowie ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a Region scarce of prey
To gorge the flesh of Lambs or yeanling Kids
On Hills where Flocks are fed, flies toward the Springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plaines
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light:
So on this windie Sea of Land, the Fiend
Walk’d up and down alone bent on his prey, ...
The extended s. is not confined to epic poetry. Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne are only two of several 17th-c. prose-writers capable of using s. with perspicuous accuracy and florid invention. Shakespeare had handled extended s. with unerring point and carried it to unmatched depths of implication. But after Milton no poet uses the epic s. with his force or precision. Keats shows craftsmanlike skill in Hyperion, his comparison of the fallen gods to Stonehenge being justly celebrated; Byron, through carelessness, misuses the epic s. in Childe Harold; Matthew Arnold cultivated the heroic manner rather too sedulously in Sohrab and Rustum but not without a few notable successes. Shelley has a curious habit, in passages of transcendent emotion, of accumulating a shower of approximate similes (both in explicit s.-form and in metaphor-form); prime examples occur in Epipsychidion 26-34, 115-23 (but cf. Adonais 17). The art of extended s. had a vogue in later 19th-c. journalism but has now happily passed out of fashion. And now that power rather than revelation has become the central concern of the public orator, the more grotesque manifestations of extended s. (e.g. “Like a paralytic who finds his arms useless to move his wheel-chair from the murderous flame that would snuff out his life, I am powerless to strain the muscles of coincidence’s arm by suggesting any connexion between the mayor’s timely affluence and the loss of the Party funds”) are seldom heard now even on political platforms.
The distinction drawn by C. S. Lewis (The Allegory of Love) between symbolic allegory and “formulated” allegory can be seen to be parallel to the distinction between metaphor and s. Symbolic allegory (e.g. Roman de la Rose, The Faerie Queene (in part at least), Pilgrim’s Progress, Kafka’s Trial) develops two or more levels of meaning simultaneously. The “formulated” allegory (e.g. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Swift’s Tale of a Tub), in which the “real meaning” is derived by direct substitution from the details and context of the “story,” may be regarded as an extension of “submerged s.”; for the comparison unfolds in the manner of an extended s., though the primary subject for comparison is withheld and the fact that a comparison is intended is (for a variety of reasons) not explicitly stated. This relation of “formulated” allegory to s. tends to be overlooked because of the habit – to be seen, for example, in Coleridge, Yeats and Fowler – of assuming that all allegory is of the type of “formulated” allegory and concluding that allegory is the contrary term to symbol.
H. Fränkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse (1921); Ker, p. 250-59; C. M. Bowra, Tradition and Design in the Iliad (1930); J. Whaler, “Grammatical Nexus of the Miltonic S.,” JEGP, 30 (1931), “Compounding and Distribution of Similes in Paradise Lost,” MP, 28 (1931), “The Miltonic S.,” PMLA, 46 (1931); I. F. Green, “Observations on the Epic Similes in the Faerie Queene,” PQ, 14 (1935); L. D. Lerner, “The Miltonic S.,” EIC, 4 (1954); M. Coffey, “Function of the Homeric S.,” AJP, 78 (1957); J. Notopoulos, “Homeric Similes in the Light of Oral Poetry,” CJ, 52 (1957); K. Widmer, “The Iconography of Renunciation: The Miltonic S.,” ELH, 25 (1958).