【 】What is an example of a simile?||Example of Simile

What is an example of a simile?

In this post I will show you  an example of a simile with the definition of it.

A simile  is an explicit comparison between two different things. Usually " as " and " like" are used in it. Example:

                 We die,

     As your hours do,and dry

                    Away

          Like to the summer's rain;

                (Robert Herrick:"To Daffodils")

In these lines human life has been compared to summer's rain drops to suggest that a man's life is as brief as a drop of summer's rain that takes no time to be evaporated.Writers use similes very frequently because similes help them suggest their meanings.

Example of Simile

Observe this,"My  affection hath an unknown bottom,like the Bay of Portugal"

.............. Shakespeare:As You Like It,Act IV,Scene I)

The analogy between the speaker's wandering and a floating cloud in the following line of Wordsworth's 

"Daffodils" indicates the aimlessness of the speaker and his dreamy mood:

" I wandered lonely as a cloud."

In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"S.T.Coleridge compares the bride to a rose:

       
The bride hath paced into the hall,

      Red as a rose is she;

The freshness,brightness ,fragnance and colour of the rose have been attributed to the bride by the use of this simile. In the same poem,there is a very famous simile:

    
 "Day after day ,day after day,

    
We stuck,nor breath nor motion;
   
    As idle as a painted ship

   Upon a painted ocean'

The analogy between the  Mariner's ship and a painted ship very effectively creates in our minds the ominous stillness of the Mariner's dreadful existence in the terribly silent sea.

Similarly effective are the similes in Shelley's "To a Skylark":

◆  "Like a star of Heaven,

  In the broad day-light

Thou art unseen ,but yet I hear thy shrill delight"

◆"Like a Poet hidden

    In the light of thought"

◆ "Like  a high-born maiden
   
    In a palace tower"

◆"Like a glow-worm golden
    In a dell of dew"

◆"Like a rose embowered
   In its own green leaves".

These similes used in successive stanzas of the poem attribute to the skylark ,the luminescence of the stars, the imagination of poets, the luxurious loneliness of princesses, the radiance of glow- worms and the beauty of roses. They very successfully  suggest  shelley's concept of romantic art.

A Few More Examples of  Similes |5 Examples of Simile

●"And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;"

.........(Keats:"To Autumn")

◆"What could have made her peaceful with a mind,

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow....."

............(W.B.Yeasts:"No Second Troy")

◆"...natural abilities are like natural plants,that need

proyning by study."
......(Bacon:"Of Studies"

◆"The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet,but still he did not die."

.........(Orwell:"The Shooting of an Elephant"

◆"I'm as nervous as a mouse"

..........(G.B.Shaw:Arms and the Man,Act I)

Simile VS Metaphor| Similes and Metaphors

A simile differs from a metaphor in the sense that a metaphor is an implicit comparison while a simile is an explicit comparison.Poets use it for suggestion ,clarification and poetic charm.

Read More: Circumlocution

Read More : Metaphor