Exercises:

1. Write two paragraphs, developing in each of them a figurative presentation of some “moral or intellectual fact.” In the first one, personify the abstraction. In the second, instead of personifying, embody the abstraction in a place, a process or a thing. For your abstract concepts, you may choose moral ones, such as Fraud, Elegance, Hypocrisy, Gentleness, Self-Deceit, etc., states of consciousness, such as Terror, Elation, Despair, Despondency (not the same thing at all!), Boredom, etc., or more general concepts such as Triviality, Profundity, Latency, Illusion, Belief.

2. (a) Write a paragraph of description or report, in which in at least three sentences a verb will work figuratively on its subject (personifying, locating, or whatever).
    (b) Take some paragraph from one of your previous assignments and revise it so that, again, on at least three occasions, previously inert verbs will be animated figuratively.

3.  Take some abstract concept you have not worked with before. Set up an extended comparison between it and some object, process, place, person, etc., but in this case, extend the comparison through all the details of likeness. The form of your writing itself depends upon making explicit these details, which have remained implicit in your previous days’ work. thus: We shall (or How may we) compare A to X? A has its b, followed by c; X, its y, followed by z, etc. Like all of these assignments, this one will require you to think a good deal about the abstract concept you choose, before beginning to write about it.

4. (a) Describe some object or place or process, as if to someone totally unfamiliar with it. Use at least three major similes, likening some part or aspect of the unfamiliar entity to something with which your listener/reader is unfamiliar.
    (b) In a second paragraph, and in a more distanced, neutral tone, analyze the similes you employed in the previous one. If one likened A to X, for example, show what unstated terms or qualities were at work (i.e., A is like X in that they share properties 1 and 2, or, in that A’s 1 is the same as X’s 2, etc.)

5. As a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a proverb in the mouth of a fool.

As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the drunkard upon his bed.

Interpret each of these biblical proverbs. What does each “mean”? How is each one true? You must answer these questions by discussing the figuration in each of them, by analyzing their similes as you did you own in the previous step of the assignment, and by going on to talk about other aspects of the formulätion

Examples

1)

To these uses of speech there are also four correspondent abuses. First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conception that which they never conceived, and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for, and thereby deceive others…

(Hobbes, Leviathan 1651)
2)

Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some spiritual appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of an eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed.

(Emerson, Nature 1836)

3)

True wit is nature to advantage dressed.
What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.

(Pope)

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

(Burke)

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

(Johnson)

Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

(Psalm 85)

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by incapacity.

(Blake)

Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.

(Blake)

4)

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but links out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure…

(Milton)

5)
Personification is more ubiquitous a figure than is usually seen. Verbs—not one’s usual assistants, but visiting strangers– can build the image all by themselves. Personification can reach out to you and guide you through an abstract concept’s abode. She can be called up by a non-neuter pronoun, as here. Personification will always be more eloquent about an idea—even, indeed, about the idea of herself—than the dead body of the abstract word.
….All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

(Donne, Devotions 1624)

6)

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:
In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows shall be darkened.
And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low;
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail; because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

(Ecclesiastes 12)

7)

Even as when some object familiar to us all —
A street, a spoon, a river, a shoe, a star, a toothache—
Is brought to our attention, called up from our memory
To light up the darkened surface of something we’ve barely known of
—So did the epic simile sing of a silent past.

SIMILES: (univocal) An apple is like an arrow. (Because the words naming both of them begin with an “a”)

(equivocal) Breakfast is like a sunset. (Because (a) both happen once a day, and (b) Well, the setting sun does sometimes look like a fried egg-yolk)

IMPLICIT SIMILE:

She brushed it away from his skin as lightly as when a mother brushes a fly away from her child who is lying in sweet sleep

(Iliad IV, tr. Lattimore)

She brushed it away from his skin as lightly as when a summer breeze blows a dried pine-needle across a terrace floor.