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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Similes
Explanation and Analysis—“Blown Gray Leaves”:
Similes in “There Will Come Soft Rains” abound, alternately blurring and sharpening the distinctions between the natural and technological realms. After the McClellans’ dog dies, the robotic cleaning mice scurry out from their nooks to clean the remains:
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.
This simile likens the mice to “gray leaves,” and it gives an organic quality to these technological devices. The cleaning mice move as though borne aloft by a breeze, possessed by an unexpected grace in their movements. By bringing a manmade creation in such proximity to the natural world, the simile smudges the boundaries between the two. In this process of comparison, the world of technology and the environment exchange qualities with each other: wind becomes described as “electrical” while the humming “regiments” blow along like leaves. Like the McClellans’ sentient house, the natural and artificial are harder to separate than we may have realized.
But this simile adds a twist by showing the limits to its own comparisons. However the “gray leaves” might change the way we perceive the mice, their mention also carries the suggestion of death. The description ironically reaffirms the difference between civilization and nature at the same time that it tries to equate them. The mice, which remove the McClellans’ dead dog from the house, are “gray,” desiccated leaves themselves. They possess no more life than the very corpse they are cleaning up. Try as they might, these manufactured, heartless devices can never attain the same emotional presence that the dog did. Technology is still unable to substitute for life itself.
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Explanation and Analysis—Elephants and Snakes:
The story features an instance of simile, metaphor, and personification in describing the house’s combat with the fire. As the fire sweeps across the kitchen, the ranks of vacuum mice scuttle out to contain the flames and the attic trapdoors deploy a “gushing green chemical”:
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.
In the first of these sentences, a simile links the fire’s movements to that of a frightened “elephant” recoiling before a snake. This is followed immediately by a metaphor that develops the comparison, identifying the “repellant” as the “snake.” Importantly, this transition from simile to metaphor intensifies the degree of comparison. The green chemicals don’t merely resemble “snakes”—at this point, they have become them. What had been understood to be the “dead snake” just one sentence before is now “whipping over the floor” and spewing “cold venom.” The repellant becomes more lifelike through the metaphor’s tightened association.
In doing so, this elaborate act of comparison invests the fire and repellant with an unlikely dynamism. Both the fire and its adversary are moving, attacking, and defending themselves. Their animalistic intensity creates a sense of vitality that is absent anywhere else. In a town of ruined houses buried beneath charcoal ash, they seem to be more lifelike and vivid than all of humanity’s own doomed creations.
Related Themes:
