Simile is a figure of speech that compares two things using “like” or “as” — “My love is like a red, red rose” (Burns), “the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (Eliot). Unlike metaphor, which identifies one thing as another, simile explicitly marks the comparison, keeping both terms distinct.
This explicitness is not weakness. Simile preserves the gap between the things compared, and that gap is where meaning lives. When Eliot compares the evening to an etherized patient, the reader holds both images — the sky and the operating table — and the dissonance between them creates the poem’s unsettling mood. A metaphor (“the evening was a patient etherized upon a table”) would fuse the images; the simile keeps them in tension.
Epic simile (also called Homeric simile) extends the comparison over multiple lines, developing the vehicle into a scene of its own. Homer compares warriors to lions, storms, or fires in passages that temporarily transport the reader out of the narrative and into the comparison — then return, with the original scene transformed by the association.
Related terms
- metaphor — figurative identification without explicit comparison markers
- lyric — figurative language is central to the lyric mode
- alliteration — sound devices that often work alongside figurative language