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This chapter looks at the early Buddhist dialogues, the Nikāya. It explores the nature of the Buddha's teaching methods, the simile of the raft and the snake, and the Buddha's silences. It begins to investigate the distinction between the two truths, as well as the relation between these and the four noble truths.

This chapter offers a modern restatement of Aristotle's notion that there is no fundamental difference in the figurative force of metaphors and similes. This is commonly called the elliptical simile view of metaphors. This chapter replaces the notion of an elliptical simile with the wider notion of a figurative comparison. On this approach, both metaphors and similes are taken to be figurative comparisons. This squares with Aristotle's view that the difference between the two is trifling.

This chapter gives a detailed survey of surviving ancient discussions of metaphor, simile, and allegory as ‘non-literal’ tropes of ornamentation. The absence of metaphor and simile from Horace’s discussions of literary style is raised as a puzzle, and explained by Horace’s wish to avoid hackneyed theory in favour of practical exemplification.

This chapter discusses the characteristic features of Indo-European poetry. Poets who write in a tradition — having been trained in the style and techniques proper to that tradition — do not strive for novelty of manner. They take over vocabulary, formulaic phrases, and typical expressions from older poets, and their language in general tends to have a more archaic appearance than that of contemporary speech. Two further features characteristic of Indo-European poetry, both of them favoured by the nature of the ancient language, are modification of word order and the use of formal figures of speech of various kinds. Vocabulary and phraseology, narrative gambits, similes, and figures are discussed.

This chapter discusses depictions of heroic activity in battle in Indo-European tradition. Topics covered include the war-band, strongholds, the hero as warrior, weapons, horses, battle narratives, speeches, similes, and the hero's funeral.

Pearsall argues against the prevailing critical conception of dramatic monologists as inadvertent in their revelations and ignorant of the consequences of their speech, suggesting instead that dramatic monologists are highly purposeful in their speech, employing sophisticated rhetorical strategies in order to effect political and personal transformation, or “rapture.” The author divides Chapter One into two major sections. The first section, “Poetics: Persuasive Similitude,” offers a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, identifying the trope of simile as a defining element of the genre, and arguing that monologists seek to perform a range of acts by way of their speech. The second section, “Politics: Whig Poetics,” details the relevance of Britain’s Whig Party and the furor surrounding the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill to Tennyson’s poetic development. Pearsall illuminates the ways in which Tennyson’s Whig political views were influenced by Arthur Henry Hallam, and helped shape his poetry both thematically and formally.

In Plato's Republic, knowledge and doxa have their own respective domains: “what is” in the case of knowledge, and “what participates in what is and in what is not” in the case of doxa. This division should be recognized as a central part of Plato's proposal in the Republic. At the same time it cannot be quite as clear-cut as it might initially appear. Otherwise it should be impossible to begin to investigate justice by thinking through someone's beliefs about justice—and that is precisely what the interlocutors do in Book I. Notably, Socrates is not prepared to put forward his beliefs about justice. Staying true to the intuition that mere doxa is “shameful and ugly,” he prefers hypotheses and similes as methods of investigation. But others are less cautious. An interpretation of the Republic's epistemology must account for an, albeit deficient, way in which mere doxa can relate to objects of knowledge.

This chapter opens up a dialogue between recent scholarship on Homeric similes, and the creative use of these similes in the poetry of Christopher Logue, Michael Longley, and Derek Walcott. In its reading of the modern poems, it analyzes how the Homeric simile is used to map the distance between Homeric epic and 20th-century poetry. Similes are among the most memorable features of Homeric epic: the chapter argues that their expressive force derives as much from their dissimilarity to the main narrative as from the parallels that they suggest. It demonstrates how Logue and Longley exploit this aspect of the Homeric simile in order to express their difference from, as well as their affinity with, Homer. In the case of Walcott, it discusses Walcott's sparing but striking use of Homeric similes, which simultaneously master the form while also signalling ambivalence about the poem's relationship with Homeric epic.

This chapter undertakes a provisional reassessment, first, of Polybius' Greek against nine syntactic/stylistic features, comparing his usage with that of both classical and later Hellenistic historians; and, secondly, of the influence of Latin on his Greek syntax and vocabulary. It suggests on the strength of examples and case studies a series of working hypotheses for further investigation, including the following: that Polybius' use of (near)synonyms is less haphazard than is often supposed; that his similes and metaphors contain further evidence of his natural fondness for everyday language; and that, notwithstanding the last, he may occasionally use syntax or vocabulary to allude to a famous predecessor historian.

The Semantic Descent account is extended to realistically complex examples, both in terms of syntactic complexity and vividness. A detailed treatment of a wide range of examples is followed by discussions of phenomena such as dead metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, mixed and extended metaphor, as well as observations about the relationship between synaesthesia and metaphor, the robustness of metaphor as a theoretical kind, the so-called ‘cognitive’ account of metaphor and visual metaphor.

Three recent and important accounts of metaphor are discussed in detail. These are: Stern’s Demonstrative account, White’s Conflated Sentence account, and Fogelin’s Simile account. What is right and wrong with these accounts can best be understood from the perspective of the Semantic Descent account, and the materials in this chapter provide some indirect further support for this account.

Metaphor embodies Amichai's principle of “in-between-ness” and has a significance within his poetic system that far exceeds the rhetorical. Chapter Five focuses on metaphor as the central marker of liminality, the hyphen of survival and resistance: it must never erase that hyphen, the marker of the disparate domains which it brings together (hence his preference for simile), even while it strives to make the gap between these domains productive of meaning. The ways Amichai's metaphors resist the erasure of difference critiques the vestiges of poststructuralist views, and offer an alternative model based on a historicized, context-sensitive reworking of prototype semantics. Amichai's images, while as novel and surprising as those of any 17th-century metaphysical poet, nevertheless strike us as completely “right,” as visually and experientially familiar, because of their perceptually primary basis and the extensive and rigorous mapping they provide for the distant source and target domains.

In Republic 2, Glaucon and Adeimantus want to be shown that justice pays higher eudaimonistic dividends to the individual who has it in his soul than does injustice. Yet Glaucon later worries that precisely because philosophers have just souls they will consent to rule Kallipolis, even though they will “live a worse life when they could lead a better one” as a result. This chapter explains how Glaucon’s worries are resolved. It includes a new reading of the ship-of-state simile from Book 6 whose relevance to Glaucon’s worries has previously gone unnoticed.

Pope, too, was swept away by a text he was translating: not a romance, but the Iliad. The passion that affected him was primarily heroic rather than amorous, and is figured (after Boileau's translation of Longinus (1674)) as the spreading of sublime ‘fire’. This metaphor of translation is evident in particular stylistic features such as the ‘super‐adding’ of similes; as we have come to expect it grows in complexity when Pope is translating moments in the source when warriors give fiery inspiration to one another. For Pope, the massacres of the Iliad find a miniature echo in his own self‐abnegation when he translates.

It has often been said — by musicians, philosophers, writers, and others — that words do not suffice to describe how one experiences music, music goes beyond words, ‘music starts where words come to an end’. That notion is also found among many of this book's narrators. They say that they can't find words that cover what they have experienced; the experience is — or certain parts of it are — indescribable. One possibility is to make use of metaphors or similes, that is, one refers to other phenomena that in some way are similar to or mirror what one experiences. About 100 narrators (approximately 10% of the participants) have made use of metaphors or similes. Most of these cases are reproduced here in the form of short quotes from the accounts concerned. They are, thus, taken out of their context, but there is a reference to the corresponding complete account. This chapter begins with metaphors and similes with regard to the actual music or performance; then metaphors and similes that concern experiences in connection with listening; performance and composition. Finally, there is a summary of the phenomena that have occurred in the metaphors and similes.