Christopher Logue’s vivid, muscular version of some episodes in the Iliad abounds with striking metaphors – I noted about 60 that leapt at me with their verve and originality, in a slim book of under 200 pages.

Many of them are short and simple and should easily slip into daily use, if we are open to expanding our stock of standard similes.  Twice in the poem Logue uses light to represent quietness or silence:

‘The sea as quiet as light.’

‘Brighter than day His shadow; silent as light

The footprint of His time-free flight

Down the Nile’s length, across the Inland Sea … ‘

Source: Christopher Logue, War Music: An account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 8 & 38