“When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise.”
“But ever heaves and moans the restless Deep.”
[261] Apostrophe is an address to the dead as if living; to abstract ideas or inanimate objects as if they were persons. It is a variety of personification.
“O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!”
“Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem.”
“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.”
Allegory is a narrative in which material things and circumstances are used to illustrate and enforce high spiritual truths. It is a continued personification. Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” are good examples of allegory.
All these figures are varieties of metaphor. In them there is always an implied, not an expressed, comparison.
A simile is an expressed comparison between unlike things that have some common quality. This comparison is usually indicated by like or as.
“Ilbrahim was like a domesticated sunbeam, brightening moody countenances, and chasing away the gloom from the dark corners of the cottage.”