Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a simile from Eudora Welty….
Eudora Welty (1909—2001) was a prolific writer from the American South who wrote in many different genres, including novels, short stories, speeches and essays.
She is most famous for her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter for which she won the award in 1973. I had never read the book and resolved to correct the deficiency last year.
I found the book — the story of a daughter confronting the second wife of her father as the man lies dying — to be ever so slightly dated. But I agree with poet Howard Moss wrote in The New York Times, the book is “a miracle of compression, the kind of book, small in scope but profound in its implications, that rewards a lifetime of work.”
Here was a piece of figurative language that most moved me:
The pecan tree there was filled with budding leaves like green bees spaced out in a hive of light.
I would never have thought to compare leaves to green bees (!) Nor would I have seen light as a “hive.” But as soon as I went looking for a photo to illustrate this post, I found one immediately. That’s even a pecan tree, too.
