1 of 10

Write now Article Tools

SIMILE
~~~~~
A simile is a way of comparing one thing to another using either 'like' or 'as'.

'The flung spray..... spits like a tame cat/Turned savage' describes the ferocity of the wind lashing at the sea in Seamus Heaney's 'Storm on the Island'. The same poet deals with childhood memories in 'Blackberry Picking' where his vivid imagination begins to see gruesome images in the ripe fruit: 'big dark blobs burned/Like a plate of eyes'.

'The skin cracks like a pod' describes the effect of drought in an Indian village in the poem 'Blessing' by Imtiaz Dharker, whereupon a pipe bursts and adults and children alike come running to collect the precious water.

'They picked Akanni up one morning/Beat him like soft clay' describes the harsh arrest, seemingly without logical reason, of the narrator's neighbours in 'Not my Business' by Niyi Osundare. The poem ends when it is the turn of the narrator himself to be taken.

'A salwar kameez..... glistening like an orange split open' describes the brilliant colour of the traditional Pakistani clothes sent to her in England in Moniza Alvi's 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan'.

'Labourers swarm..... like crows attacking crow-black fields' focuses on the crowds of field-workers in Seamus Heaney's 'At a Potato Digging'. In contrast 'but God, ever nigh,/Appeared like his father in white' to rescue a child whose father had left him behind whilst walking home in the dark in 'The Little boy Found' by William Blake.

In 'Sonnet 130' William Shakespeare uses similes in the opposite way when he says 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;' and yet he values her love above everything.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

METAPHO R
~~~~~~~~~
A metaphor compares something to something else by saying it IS something else or DOES something else, e.g., 'it's raining cats and dogs' or 'that makes my blood boil'. The cricketer Fred Truman once famously said 'I don't use metaphors. I don't like to beat about the bush,' which of course is itself a metaphor.

As with assonance, Seamus Heaney uses metaphors with striking effect in his poem 'Death of a Naturalist'. As he sets the scene in the first stanza, he describes how 'bluebottles/Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell' of rotten flax at a dam. It is as though the flies created a thin barrier by buzzing around the flax.

The poem 'Search for my Tongue' by Sujata Bhatt uses an extended metaphor (over the course of several lines of the poem) to express the idea that her mother tongue insists on making its presence felt, and seems to grow like a plant: 'the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth..... it blossoms out of my mouth.'

'Catrin' by Gillian Clarke expresses the desire of both mother and child to establish their separate identities. At the time of birth, the umbilical cord is described by the metaphor 'the tight/red rope of love' that mother and baby are fighting over.

In 'Anne Hathaway' Carol Ann Duffy imagines that Shakespeare's wife felt that the nights she spent with her husband took her to a world of fantasy: 'The bed we loved in was a spinning world/of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas...'

In a far less magical vein, Charles Tichbourne wrote 'Tichbourne's Elegy' in the Tower of London in 1586 before his execution. He was still young at the time, and the poem contains a number of metaphors expressing his regret that he will not be able to live out the course of his life:

'My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

...My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green.'

The examples quoted here are all from the GCSE AQA Anthology for English Language and Literature, Specification A (2005 onwards).

Learn more about this author, Liz Allen.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about The difference between a simile and a metaphor?
We want to hear your view. Write now!