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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
Key Examples in Watership Down
Chapter 2: The Chief Rabbit
Explanation and Analysis—A Wire:
In Chapter 2, Fiver and Hazel approach Threarah, beseeching him to move the colony on Fiver's advice. The young rabbit predicts the future downfall of the warren, in one of the novel's first prominent examples of foreshadowing:
"But there's no time, Threarah, sir," blurted out Fiver. "I can feel the danger like a wire round my neck—like a wire—Hazel, help!" He squealed and rolled over in the sand, kicking frantically, as a rabbit does in a snare. Hazel held him down with both forepaws and he grew quieter.
Chapter 4: The Departure
Explanation and Analysis—Waves:
In the following excerpt from Chapter 4, the narrator attempts to characterize rabbit behavior, placing it in the context of other animal behavior. The narrator utilizes a simile to do this:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires [...]—the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the center and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves [...].
Related Themes:
Chapter 9: The Crow and the Beanfield
Explanation and Analysis—Orange Blossoms:
In the following excerpt from Chapter 9, Hazel encounters a field of beans—a crop he has neither seen nor smelled before. Using simile, the narrator describes this experience:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The strange fragrance was stronger now, coming over the top of the rise in a wave of scent that struck him powerfully as the scent of orange blossom in the Mediterranean strikes a traveler who smells it for the first time. Fascinated, he ran to the crest. Nearby was another hedgerow and beyond, moving gently in the breeze, stood a field of broad beans in full flower.
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Chapter 11: Hard Going
Explanation and Analysis—Fragments:
In Chapter 11, Hazel and his fellow refugee rabbits travel through a seemingly endless night, hazy and disoriented. The narrator utilizes an apt simile to describe Hazel's feelings in the moment:
Unlock with LitCharts A+All was confusion, ignorance, clambering and exhaustion. Throughout the bad dream of the night's journey, Pipkin seemed to be always close beside him. Though each of the others vanished and reappeared like fragments floating round a pool, Pipkin never left him; and his need for encouragement became at last Hazel's only support against his own weariness.
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Explanation and Analysis—General:
In the following example of simile from Chapter 11, Hazel contemplates his own role as an egalitarian leader concerned with the health and well-being of all of the rabbits under his protection:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Hazel's feelings were like those which might pass through the mind of a defeated general. Where were his followers exactly? He hoped, not far away. But were they? All of them? Where had he led them? What was he going to do now? What if an enemy appeared at this moment? [...] Behind him, Pipkin shivered in the damp, and he turned and nuzzled him—much as the general, with nothing left to do, might fall to considering the welfare of his servant, simply because the servant happened to be there.
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Chapter 13: Hospitality
Explanation and Analysis—Hemispheres:
In Chapter 13, the refugee rabbits from Sandleford Warren and the rabbits from Cowslip's warren meet for the first time. The meeting is a tense one, not unlike two groups of soldiers meeting on the battlefield, yet unsure whether their new acquaintances are friend or foe. The narrator uses an apt simile in this passage to describe the two groups coming together:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Just as a battle begins in a state of equilibrium between the two sides, which gradually alters one way or the other until it is clear that the balance has tilted so far that the issue can no longer be in doubt—so this gathering of rabbits in the dark, beginning with hesitant approaches, silences, pauses, movements, crouchings side by side and all manner of tentative appraisals, slowly moved, like a hemisphere of the world into summer, to a warmer, brighter region of mutual liking and approval, until all felt sure that they had nothing to fear.
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Chapter 14: “Like Trees in November”
Explanation and Analysis—Lullabies:
In the following example of simile from Chapter 14, Blackberry notes that the other rabbits in Cowslip's warren sing to their young, not unlike birds or human beings:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Hazel explained. Blackberry was as much at a loss as he had been himself. "But I'll tell you another thing," he said. "Bigwig wasn't so far wrong. They do sing like the birds. I was in a burrow belonging to a rabbit called Betony. His doe has a litter and she was making a noise over them rather like a robin in autumn. To send them to sleep, she said. It made me feel queer, I can tell you."
Chapter 20: A Honeycomb and a Mouse
Explanation and Analysis—Missile:
Throughout Watership Down, the narrator utilizes the language of human violence and warfare to characterize the rabbits' interactions with elil, their various enemies and predators. Note the following example of this from Chapter 20, wherein the narrator uses a simile made up of military language to describe Hazel's encounter with a kestrel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Before Hazel could spring back from the mouth of the hole, the mouse had dashed between his front paws and was pressed to the ground between his back legs. At the same moment the kestrel, all beak and talons, hit the loose earth immediately outside like a missile thrown from the tree above.
Related Themes:
Chapter 26: Fiver Beyond
Explanation and Analysis—Weasels:
In the following excerpt from Chapter 26, Fiver finds himself plagued with nightmares following what the group believes to be Hazel's demise. The narrator uses a simile to describe one of these nightmares:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In the livid, foggy twilight, Fiver stared at the board. As he stared, the black sticks flickered on the white surface. They raised their sharp, wedgeshaped little heads and chattered together like a nestful of young weasels. The sound, mocking and cruel, came faintly to his ears, as though muffled by sand or sacking. "In memory of Hazel-rah! In memory of Hazel-rah! In memory of Hazel-rah! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
Chapter 27: “You Can’t Imagine It Unless You’ve Been There”
Explanation and Analysis—Somber Tree:
In the following example of simile from Chapter 27, the narrator compares Pipkin's knowledge of Hazel's presumed demise to a "somber tree," one Pipkin has planted deep within himself:
Unlock with LitCharts A+When Pipkin had planted in himself, like some somber tree, the knowledge that Hazel would never return, his bewilderment exceeded his grief: and this bewilderment he saw on every side among his companions. Faced with no crisis of action and with nothing to prevent them from continuing their life in the warren as before, the rabbits were nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their luck was gone.
Related Themes:
Chapter 47: The Sky Suspended
Explanation and Analysis—Bitter Snow:
In the following excerpt from Chapter 47, Vervain has an unexpected and jarring encounter with Fiver in Watership Down. The narrator uses a simile to describe the impact this encounter has on Vervain:
Unlock with LitCharts A+As [Vervain] continued to meet the eyes of this unaccountable enemy—the only one he had faced in all the long night’s search for bloodshed—horror came upon him and he was filled with a sudden fear of his words, gentle and inexorable as the falling of bitter snow in a land without refuge. The shadowy recesses of the strange burrow seemed full of whispering, malignant ghosts and he recognized the forgotten voices of rabbits done to death months since in the ditches of Efrafa.
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