Thought like a risen moon
This one puzzles me a little - the moon a sheet of silver calm yet the water turbulent, which would...
Like a surgeon’s knife
Adam Bede is so far from being like a timid woman that this is striking, and Eliot uses the idea...
Petrified sea
A fine image of mountains appearing like rearing waves petrified in mid air.
... the mountains that...
Where life meets death
A surprising metaphor for the inexorable link between life and death, with the same sense of something encroaching with age. From...
Fallen pieces of the moon
A haunting way to think of icebergs, moon-pieces fallen from the sky. Especially when lit at night by their mother-ship's...
Smell as a carrier of memory
For better or worse, few things can as quickly transport you to another place, time, or experience as a smell. ...
Unreel writing
There's something of fairy-tale magic in this idea of writing as a thread teased out from the writer's cupboard of...
From pantheon to palate
A piled up commentary of poets on poets: Heaney on Mandelstam on Dante. Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), who died in uncertain...
A clinging sound
What a description of a sound that can’t be unheard.
'That noise was to cling to his inner ear like...
Of merry audacious jays
Two fine metaphors here, describing the nature and the cry of jays, though the first of these is by now...
Intimate with hugeness
A wonderful way to describe bobbing on the sea close to the sheer cliffs of the islands, and edging towards still,...
As inert as …
Two fine similes to describe inertness, of which I lean to the first as being more euphonic and original.
'…...
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