No more similes? That’s like trying to eat soup with a fork!
Spring has sprung at last. My mind turns to the playful poetry of Ogden Nash, who in “Spring Song” penned “Twang the cheerful lute and zither! Spring is absolutely hither!” Yet reading on, my vernal spirits that so recently were soaring suddenly dropped like a pair of soaking-wet corduroys.
The drop came when I turned to “Very Like a Whale,” in which Nash struck a less mirthful tone: “One thing that literature would be greatly the better for / Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.” Fewer similes and metaphors? He might as well have drawn a thick, unyielding line — one as jarring as a needle scratching across a vinyl record.
With all due respect to the great Ogden Nash, I stand with the simile and an author’s right to use one, in springtime and beyond.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for more clarity in writing, but reading my favorite prankish poet’s proscription was as disorienting as how it feels when removing a T-shirt while standing directly under a spinning ceiling fan. Like an Adirondack chair, his censorious view is easier to get into than out of as time passes.
After all, blanket statements rarely stand the test of time, as inarguably as the adage “dress for the job you want” doesn’t help an accountant seeking to become a beekeeper. Like a band conductor who invariably describes his trumpeter as a man who never toots his own horn, Nash’s sullen take raises more questions than it answers.
In deference to the witty wordsmith, I’ll willingly part ways with metaphors, which have all the subtlety of tidal waves, to answer the clarion call for clarity. But how could a master of light verse have objected to the oh-so-breezy simile, a figure of speech capable of such delightful deployment?
Was Nash being ironic? Possibly. But if so, like a hipster’s ode on mighty Greek warrior Achilles rupturing his own Achilles tendon, or his sardonic screenplay about a corporate whistleblower reporting wrongdoing within a company that manufactures only whistles, the irony was simply too much.
Perhaps Nash first ruminated on his verse in the solitude of a walk, and quiet thought was interrupted. As a celebrity, he must have known he’d find no peace ambling about, as surely as someone named Sherwin Williams cannot expect it when entering a paint store on a busy Saturday morning.
Maybe Nash wasn’t serious at all. Maybe he was merely playing with language, the way one might spend an idle afternoon trying to teach a cat irregular verbs.
Then again, the verse might have been an admonition.
A simile in the wrong hands can be as dangerously misleading as a manager who describes a lazy employee — one who just happens to be shopping for four new radials — as a “tireless worker.” In an age of rising relativism, maybe the bard was warning of the perils of verbal sorcery.
Whatever his thinking, the problem for writers is plain: Swearing off similes is unbearable, like not correcting a dinner companion who’s asked a waiter for not a carafe but a giraffe of water. It’s as unsurprising as the ending to the classic novel “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”
With all due respect to the great Ogden Nash, I stand with the simile and an author’s right to use one, in springtime and beyond. I won’t die on this hill — having already parted ways with metaphors — but I’m as sure of my view as night follows day.
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thefederalist.com