Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Alfred Tennyson
Ambition
Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink
The more you thirst—yea—drink too much, as men
Have done on rafts of wreck—it drives you mad.Beauty passes like a breath.Black as ashbuds in the front of March.Blank as death.Blind as any noonday owl.Bright as light.Bright and light as the crest of a peacock.Burnt as a living fire as emeralds.Burst, like a thunderbolt.Burst like Heavenly Hope.Chimes, like silver hammers falling on silver anvils.Chirping, like the dry
High-elbow’d grigs that leap in summer grass.Clasped her like a lover.Clean as blood of babes.Clear as wind.Clung
Like serpent eggs together.Crept to the gate, and open’d it, and closed,
As lightly as a sick man’s chamber-door.Crashed, like a hurricane.Like simple noble natures, credulous.Cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows
To pity.The air is damp, and hush’d, and close as a sick man’s room when he taketh repose an hour before death.Dance like a wither’d leaf.Dear as remember’d kisses after death.A grief as deep as life or thought.Died like odor rapt in the winged wind,
Borne into the alien lands and far away.Drove like a cataract.Empty as a skull.Faints like a dazzled morning moon.Fairer than Rachel by the palmy well,
Fairer than Ruth among the fields of corn.Softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass.Fine as ice-ferns on January panes.Comes fitfully like broken music.Fixt
As are the roots of earth and base of all.Fled like a glittering rivulet to the tarn.As flies the shadow of a bird, she fled.Fleeting like a beam of light.Flitted away like a kite wi’ a brokken string.Frail
As perfume of the cuckoo-flower.Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail.Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells.Gaunt as it were the skeleton of himself.Music that gentler on the spirit lies,Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.Glancing like a dragon-fly.Gleamed like fancy made of golden air.Glittered like a bed of flowers.Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.Grand as doomsday and as grave.Grave as from a funeral.Hoarse
As when a hawker hawks his wares.Hold like colors of a shell.Hollow as the hopes and fears of men.Hurled as a stone from out of a catapult.Hurry … like the leaf in a roaring whirlwind.Hush’d … as a sick man’s room when he taketh repose.Lean as death.Leapt like a passing thought.Light as the singing bird that wings the air.My spirit loved and loves him yet,
Like some poor girl whose heart is set
On one whose rank exceeds her own.Lovely as a landscape in a dream.He melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven.Melt like mist.The verse murmurs … like the moan of doves in immemorial elms.More near and near,
Like doves about a dovecote, wheeling round.Pale as Jephtha’s daughter.Pale as the passing of a ghost.Panted hard,
Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed.Pass like a light.Rang out like hollow woods, at hunting-tide.Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning weeds.Rich as Emperor-moths.Rich as for the nuptials of a king.Rippled like an over-fleeting wave.Roll’d about like tumbled fruit in grass.Ruthless as a baby with a worm.Sharp as reproach.Shines like fires in swamps.Sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone.Smiling as a master at one
That is not of his school, nor any school
But that where blind and naked Ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed.There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass.Sparkles like a grain of salt.Splinter’d like an icicle.Stiff as a viper frozen.Stiff as Lot’s wife.Sway’d
Like those long mosses in the stream.Swept like a torrent.Sweet as new buds in spring.Tall as a figure lengthened on the sand.Thick as Autumn rains.Thick as dust in vacant chambers.Her slender nose
Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower.Troubled, as if with anger or pain.Uncertain as a vision or a dream.White as any flower.White as privet.White as utter truth.Willingly
As birds make ready for their bridal time.
