Hello, everyone! Good to see all of you here at the dVerse Poet’s Pub for a round of poetics. Pick up a glass of cheer or a cup of comfort and settle down in your favorite spot as we contemplate a tool of rhetoric in prose and poetry known as a simile. There’s nothing like a well-turned phrase with a simile that makes us smile with pure joy at its relatability or humor.

I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

Muhammed Ali, 1964, after his first title fight against Sonny Liston

As you know, a simile is a comparison between two unlike things using the words, “like” or “as.” The word “simile” itself is a Latin word meaning “like.” And we use a simile to describe or explain something unfamiliar, or to expand on or distill an abstraction, by relating it to something more familiar. As a rhetorical tool, it‘s very effective in conveying meaning while giving pleasure in discovering resemblances. But it also satisfies our deep emotional or psychological need not merely to inform but to relate to one another.

During the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, while on the lunar highlands working in moondust which they had never seen before, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell could use only “like’s” to describe it:
“When you put your scoop in, it smooths out—just like plaster.”
“I was going to say—like cement.”

Poets are only doing what comes naturally when we find likenesses.

As little flowers, which the chill of night has bent and huddled, when the white sun strikes, grow straight and open fully on their stems, so did I, too, with my exhausted force.”

Dante, Inferno, Canto 2

When we read, “O my Luve is like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June;/O my Luve is like a melody/That’s sweetly played in tune,” we can’t help but smile at the perfect joy the poet Robert Burns relates, or feel the isolation of Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” admiring all the while the simple perfection of the comparison.

Here are various examples of simile in poetry to run your eyes over:

“A seal swims like a poodle through the sheet/of blinding salt . . . .” (Robert Lowell)
“If they are good it would be seen;/Good is as visible as green . . . .” (John Donne)
“[God] hangs in shades the orange bright,/Like golden lamps in a green night.” (Andrew Marvell)
“A light rain, as tranquil as an apple.” (Anne Sexton)
“She rides her hips as/it were a horse.” (William Carlos Williams)

Sometimes a simile can be supercharged, where the comparison casts an extra layer of meaning. In Yeats’ “No Second Troy” he writes:

“What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this . . . .”

Fire may be simple, but it is also destructive. A tightened bow may be beautiful, but it’s also threatening. All this comes to play with the deliberate use of these two similes.

Sometimes a simile will determine the structure of an entire poem as in John Ciardi’s “Most Like An Arch This Marriage.”

Most Like an Arch This Marriage by John Ciardi (1958)

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become a term.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what’s strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

Similes can run rampant throughout a poem like Traci Brimhall’s “Love Without a Drop of Hyperbole In It.”

Or a simile can help punctuate a poem’s climax as in Mary Oliver’s “Morning in a New Land.”

Morning In A New Land by Mary Oliver

In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang, 
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields. 
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away,

And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.’

John Ashberry’s “A Worldly Company” couches a simile smack dab in the center of his poem so that it hangs illuminatingly over the whole. Coleridge’s Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath centers his simile so that it delightfully impresses on what precedes and follows.

Whatever the subject you choose to write on for this poetics challenge, I’d like you to use the rhetorical device of a simile. You can use similes all the way through like Brimhall; or use one or two to bring your poetry to full effect, whether in the beginning, middle, or end; or use it like Ciardi to structure the whole of your poem, enlarging on a single image of comparison. You may also choose to smile or not smile while doing so. I hope you smile.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:
* Write a poem in response to the challenge.
* Post your poem on your blog and link back to this post.
* Enter your name and the link to your post by clicking Mr. Linky below (remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy).
* Read and comment on your fellow poets’ work –- there’s so much to derive from reading each other’s writing: new inspiration, new ideas, new friends. Enjoy!

* Mr. Linky will remain open until 3pm EST on Thursday, February 5th. If you miss the closing time, do link your poem up to the next dVerse OLN so we can all still enjoy it.