Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Found: similes!

Our last lesson in Matt Whitling's Grammar of Poetry was about similes.  Similes are sometimes harder to find than you'd think. I keep seeing personification, metaphor, but not so many similes.

But here are some I just came across.

Oh! I have just had such a lovely dream!
And then I woke,
And all the dream went out like kettle-steam,
Or chimney-smoke.

My dream was all about--how funny, though!
I've only just
Dreamed it, and now it has begun to blow
Away like dust.

~~ Eleanor Farjeon, from "Waking Up," in The Kingfisher book of Children's Poetry

In a single motion the river comes and goes.
At times, living beside it, we hardly notice it
as it noses calmly along within its bounds
like the family pig.  But a day comes
when it swiftens, darkens, rises, flowers over
its banks, spreading its mirrors out upon the flat fields of the valley floor, and then
it is like God's love or sorrow, including
at last all that had been left out.

~~ Wendell Berry, from "Sabbaths 1998" in Given: poems

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