Black Beauty: Similes 4 key examples

The phrase "shone like a rook’s wing" compares Black Beauty’s coat to the iridescent black feathers of birds in the crow family. These birds have plumage that is deep, dark, and rich in color. Rooks belong to this group and although they’re black, in the sunlight their iridescent feathers shimmer brilliantly with many colors. Thinking of Black Beauty’s coat as being like the wing of a rook provides a vivid image of its plushness and its gleaming shine to the reader.

This passage’s visual imagery serves a dual purpose. It points to Black Beauty's well-kept condition and, by extension, his initial contentment with his situation. Birds are often associated with freedom and happiness in Black Beauty, as they aren’t constrained by human rules and human cruelties. This imagery emphasizes that when Black Beauty is cared for, he flourishes. However, the author also suggests that the inverse is true. Neglect and poor treatment can make something beautiful become ordinary, a point reinforced later in the story when Black Beauty's coat loses its luster.

Black Beauty has just finished a long gallop. He makes his physical condition clear to the reader through descriptions of his steaming body heat and pouring sweat. The passage focuses intensely on the sensory language of moisture, capturing the narrator’s dripping body and his labored breathing. He is so sweaty that he has “not a dry hair” in his whole coat. He is literally soaked through, and so worn out that he can “only stand and pant.”

To further emphasize the intensity of his effort and the heat emanating from his body, Sewell employs a simile that likens Black Beauty to a boiling pot on a fire. The phrase "I steamed all over [...] like a pot on the fire" gives a vivid picture of the clouds of white steam emerging from Beauty’s black body. It’s as if he is boiling the water inside him from all the effort he’s just made. The reader can almost feel the steam rising from his overheated body.

By drawing a parallel between “St. Vitus’s dance” and Larry's incessant use of the whip, the narrative underscores the idea that his actions are not just excessive, but almost involuntary and thoughtless. This disorder is now more commonly known as “Syndham’s Chorea.” It provokes involuntary limb movements in children, which are uncontrollable and can be alarming. This allusion offers readers a vivid illustration of Larry's behavior, suggesting that he wields the whip without consideration or restraint. The comparison not only criticizes Larry's actions but also alludes to a larger societal issue: the thoughtless and habitual cruelty towards animals by those who should be their caretakers.

When Jerry observes Larry's actions, saying his whip goes "as if you had the St Vitus’ dance in your arm," the simile paints a striking picture. Readers are invited to visualize Larry's arm in jerky, uncontrolled, and erratic motion, akin to someone suffering from the disease. By suggesting that the whipping seems beyond Larry's control, Jerry indirectly questions Larry's competence and temperament as a handler.

Furthermore, the use of this simile subtly conveys the criticism and disapproval Jerry feels towards such behavior, as “St. Vitus’s dance” was a disorder only seen in children. He is implying that Larry’s lack of “any peace or encouragement” toward the horses is childish and ignorant.

The simile here suggests that if Harry’s father had been a drinker, the sickness that almost took his life would have “burnt him up like a piece of paper.” When Sewell likens a drinker to paper that could be swiftly consumed by fire, she’s drawing attention to the heightened vulnerability alcohol causes. As alcohol is extremely flammable, the image of adding alcohol to a fire is also a reference to things worsening rapidly.

The comparison is particularly evocative in this instance because Harry’s father had a terrible fever. His fever was so high, the doctor implies, that adding alcohol to it would have made him explode in flames. The idea that a fever in a "drinking man" could "burn him up like a piece of paper" provides an intense picture for the reader. It helps to clarify the risks associated with alcohol consumption in this novel, and to give a sense of just how raging and terrible the fever itself was.