Constructing a simile, by explicitly telling us that there is a similarity, the songwriter says: A pretty girl is like a melody,” and if we get into the song, by the end when we hear “a pretty girl is just like a melody,” we know emotively what the speaker has been trying to say, and we pay no attention to the ways in which a pretty girl is not like a melody. We are emotively fixed on, and charged by, this wistful kind of dance of love.

“O my love is like a red red rose”—forget the thorns, unless the poet points up the irony. The brain has gotten very good at this selectivity, if the poet gives it half a chance. The emotion and/or the idea focuses our attention on the pertinent features, and the success of that focusing by the apt comparison, well put, is a sign of good poetry. It happens now and then in good conversation; it should happen more often in poetry.

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Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press