Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Cling
Cling around the soul, as the sky clings round the mute earth forever beautiful.
—Anonymous
Clinging … as ivy clings about an oak; as tuft-hunters with buzz and purr about a fellow-commoner.
—Anonymous
Cling like a forlorn hope.
—Anonymous
Clinging like a wet towel to a nail.
—Anonymous
Cling like moss to a damp wall.
—Anonymous
Clung … like a damp dish-cloth around a stove pipe.
—Anonymous
Clung like a drowning man.
—Anonymous
Clings like the wicked stench of the harlot’s room.
—John Antrobus
Clung like a beast’s hide to his fleshless bones.
—Edwin Arnold
Clung to the merry music of her words, like a bird on a bough, high swaying in the wind.
—Philip James Bailey
Clings fast as the clinging vine.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Clings like an octopus.
—Robert Browning
Clinging … as friend with friend, or husband with wife,
Makes hand in hand the passage of life.
—William Cullen Bryant
Cling like Death’s embrace.
—H. C. Bunner
Cling like Ivy.
—Robert Burton
Clung like a cuirass to his breast.
—Lord Byron
Clinging like a faint odor.
—Henry A. Clapp
Cling to the memory as tenaciously as the fragrance of lavender clings to glove or lace.
—Henry A. Clapp
Clung to the soil like Caliban.
—Charles Dickens
Cling to the old house as barnacles to a wrecked and stranded vessel.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Clinging … like pigeons on a roof-slope.
—Thomas Hardy
Clung … like ivy to a tree.
—Maurice Hewlett
Cling … like the spokes of a wheel.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Clings … like the weed in the face of the cliff.
—Thomas Hood
Clings cruelly to us, like the gnawing sloth
On the deer’s tender haunches.
—John Keats
Cling like the sloth.
—Rudyard Kipling
Clings about thee close, like moss to stones.
—Walter S. Landor
Cling, like bees about a flower’s wine-cup.
—Gerald Massey
Cling
Like flies to the sheer precipice.
—Lewis Morris
Clung like a spectral snow.
—John G. Neihardt
Clung … like magnet to steel.
—T. Buchanan Read
Clung like drowning men beneath the wave.
—Bayard Taylor
Clung
Like serpent eggs together.
—Alfred Tennyson
Her kisses burn where they close and cling
Like pain of longing or fire of hell.
—George Sylvester Viereck
Clinging like sentry to his post.
—Virgil
Clings … like pitch.
—Virgil
Cling, as clings the tufted moss,
To bear the winter’s lightning chills.
—John Greenleaf Whittier