he tools we have and wait for grace as for rain" (137). She continues, saying that the similes do a number of tasks: they "convey real information about the tenor, or locate it in an experiential realm"; they do this by "stimulating the sensual memory," perhaps inducing "in the reader an experience which characterizes the subject, " she adds (138). They also may, she notes, "be proleptic. . . . They often prefigure subsequent events in the story. Thus Satan is compared to Leviathan . . ." (139). The similes, she continues, "put is in training of a sort, give us sometimes a running start and sometimes the edge of the cliff . . ." (140); they "focus attention upon the act of perception itself and make us aware that we are not looking alone . . ." (142), that "we read in the company of those who have read before" (147). James Whaler, in an oft referenced article regarding the use of animal similes in Paradise Lost, notes that:From Homer on, certain images have been part of the epic poet's inheritance and equipment. Not only has he felt obliged to introduce them somewhere into his work, but to distribute them in the very proportion observed by his predecessors. Beasts, plants, any phenomena used in previous epic simile belonged to him, too, if he could make them at home in a new context. Of course he was free to originate novel images from contemporary events or his own personal experience; but Homer's high precedent, or Vergil's, prescribed the old images as well. Milton's choice of imagery, however, is distinguished from that of other important epic poets of Western Europe by an iron control over, a virtual renunciation of, animal similes. (534)Whaler comments that Milton "selects an animal image only when the perfect opportunity appears" (545), that Milton "must have felt they had had their day" (538). Whaler goes on to examine, after a lengthy discussion of other epic animal similes, Milton's rare use of such similes, specifically that ...
