What is Simile? What is the difference between Simile and Comparison?

Simile Metaphor

What is Simile?

Simile is a comparison between two different things or actions with like, as.

eg. He is as ferocious as a tiger. 

Note:

The things or actions must be different.

eg. He is as ferocious as his wife.

This is not a simile. It is only a comparison. 

Examples of Simile: 

The bride hath paced into the hall
Red as a rose is she. 

-Coleridge

The water like a witch's oils

Burnt green and blue and white. 

-Coleridge

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb. I arise and unbuild it again.

- Shelley

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe. Like without leaves to quicken a new birth.

-Shelley 

Difference between simile and comparison: 

Merely the resemblance between two different objects is stated in simile.

All the various points of similarity are brought out in a comparison. 

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest

With his martial clock around him.  

-Simile

Kings are like stars- they rise and set- they have,
The worship of the world, but no repose.  

-Comparison

There are six logically different kinds of comparison: 

• open comparisons, 
• simple closed comparisons, and 
• variable closed comparisons.

Each of which has both an affirmative and a negative form. There are, correspondingly, six logically different kinds of simile. 

The difference between a simile and an ordinary comparison, however, is that similes are predicative comparisons (in which the predicate describes the subject), and ordinary comparisons are symmetrical comparisons (in which the subject and the predicate are referentially independent). In the latter, but not in the former, the subject and the predicate can be inter-substituted without any consequential change of meaning. Some concluding remarks deal with simile in discourse and in literature, and demonstrate that simile is quite different from, and independent of, metaphor.

What is metaphor?

Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. The comparison is implied. That is why a metaphor is often called an implied simile.

The curfew tols the knell of parting day.

-Gray

He has not a shade of doubt about it.

I drank delight of battle with my peers.

- Tennyson

I will drink life to the lees.

- Tennyson

This is a lame excuse.