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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
Book 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Pumpkins in the Sun:
In this passage from Book 1, Chapter 2 of My Ántonia, the author uses a simile to describe Jim's contentment with his current situation, likening him to the pumpkins growing in his grandmother’s garden. Lying on the earth, Jim describes how he:
[...] kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.
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Explanation and Analysis—Ocean of Grass:
Near the beginning of Book 1, Cather uses a simile and some sensory language evoking the ocean to describe Jim's bewildered first observations of the Nebraska landscape:
Unlock with LitCharts A+As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
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Book 1, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Ántonia and Lena:
Cather positions the characters Ántonia Shimerda and Lena Lingard as foils, using visual imagery to differentiate them and describing Ántonia with a simile linking her to the natural world. Jim Burden is attracted to both in different ways, and he struggles to understand his feelings for each girl. Ántonia is innocent, earthy, and physically captivating, as Cather describes when Jim first meets her in Book 1, Chapter 3. Jim is quite struck by her eyes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They were big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark colour. Her brown hair was curly and wild-looking.
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Explanation and Analysis—Rugged Ashes:
In Book 1, Chapter 3, Willa Cather employs a paradoxical simile to describe Mr. Shimerda's face and to foreshadow his later suicide:
Unlock with LitCharts A+His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes—like something from which all the warmth and light had died out.
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Book 1, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Melons:
In Book 1, Chapter 5, Cather uses a simile to compare the face of Pavel to the watermelons he grows and devours, and to give a sense of his character for the reader. Jim, describing Pavel, recounts that:
Unlock with LitCharts A+His rosy face, with its snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves.
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Book 1, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Evil Bird:
In Book 1, Chapter 8, Cather uses the simile of a frightening bird to describe the bad luck that befalls the Russians Peter and Pavel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to put them out of mind.
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Explanation and Analysis—Pavel's Body:
In Book 1, Chapter 8, Cather uses a simile and a metaphor to describe Pavel's struggle for breath and to foreshadow his death, as he lies patiently fighting for air after an accident:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He lay patiently fighting for breath, like a child with croup. Ántonia’s father uncovered one of his long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.
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Book 3, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Sky, Star, Text:
Early in Book 3, Chapter 2, Cather uses several similes and idyllic visual imagery, invoking the hazy, lazy beauty of the Spring Nebraska landscape. Jim sits in his new bedroom gazing out of the window and observes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains—like the lamp engraved upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens, and waking new desires in men.
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Book 4, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Growing Land:
In Book 4, Chapter 3, Jim reflects on the changes he can see in the Nebraska landscape between his childhood and his return as an adult using two similes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea [...] I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.
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Book 4, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Sun and Moon:
In Chapter 4, Book 4 Cather uses imagery, simile, and personification to describe the sun and moon appearing in the sky simultaneously. She does this to foreshadow the imminent separation between Jim and Ántonia. During Jim and Ántonia's emotional farewell, the sun and moon "confront" each other on each side of the horizon:
Unlock with LitCharts A+As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
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Book 5, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—The Road:
In Book 5, Chapter 3, Cather uses a pair of similes to describe the last remaining patch of the first prairie-road that crossed the Nebraska plains. When Jim returns to Nebraska as an adult, he notices that:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.
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