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"So stretched out huge in length": reading the extended simile
Style, Fall, 2001 by Catherine Addison
The jolt is greater than with most short similes, because more of the reader's loyalties have transferred themselves across the boundary into the vehicle's world.
Browning's hive simile is still relatively brief. The crossing of the boundary is much more complete in longer similes, as in the following from Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum:
"The mighty Rustum shall avenge my death! My father, whom I seek through all the world, He shall avenge my death, and punish thee!" As when some hunter in the spring hath found A breeding eagle sitting on her nest, Upon the craggy isle of a hill lake, And pierc'd her with an arrow as she rose, And followed her to find her where she fell Far off;--anon her mate comes winging back From hunting, and a great way off descries His huddling young left sole; at that, he checks His pinion, and with short uneasy sweeps Circles above his eyry, and with loud screams Chiding his mate back to her nest; but she Lies dying, with the arrow in her side, In some far stony gorge out of his ken, A heap of fluttering feathers: never more Shall the lake glass her, flying over it; Never the black and dripping precipices Echo her stormy scream as she sails by:-- As that poor bird flies home, nor knows his own loss-- So Rustum knew not his own loss, but stood Over his dying son, and knew him not. (211-12; 11.553-75)
Here, the reader becomes deeply involved in the vehicle's story, for it goes on so long that she has forgotten the urgencies and tensions of the main narrative by the time that the demand, "So," comes that she return to it. Her sense of wrenching in this crossing from one story to the other is unavoidable. The split consciousness characteristic of short similes, though potential when this simile begins, does not materialize, for the reader becomes wholly engrossed as the vehicle unfolds. Instead, as she finds herself negotiating the hiatus between vehicle and tenor at the end of the simile, and at that precise point, just before she acknowledges the comparison's relevance, she feels the tenor to be the foreign country and the vehicle as "home." The acknowledgment of relevance marks her shift of allegiances in the next moment.
The vehicle is able to compete with the main narrative in this way because it is elaborated freely, on its own, without reminders about points of correspondence with the tenor. In fact, many of its features do not parallel anything in the tenor at all--the maternal issue, for example, and the fact that the killer and the bereaved are separate beings. The vehicle is also given an extensive context and almost complete specificity. Despite the use of "some" and the indefinite article in the first two lines, and notwithstanding the simple present tense, which is normally a generalizing device, the story just does not come over as a typical case. Indeed, because their tragic story is particularized so minutely, the reader cannot accept these eagles as representatives of a type. They exist for her as individual characters, not in the father-son story of the main narrative, but in a secondary narrative embedded in the first.
