 Among the Figures of Speech, metaphor and simile are obvious models: "The fog comes / on little cat feet"; or "O my Luve's like a red, red rose", for example, both draw on analogies, between the fog and the cat in the first case and my Luve and a rose in the second. But among analogies we may also include personification, allegory and other images, literary symbols, and by a stretch of the imagination, perhaps even metonymy. Contrast, by comparison, is a form of inverse analogy. If you say of someone, with hyperbole, that he is "older than dirt", then anything true of dirt because of its great age will, a fortiori, be true of him. Parallelisms too, especially when they are semantically (as opposed to syntatically) parallel, are analogies; and these parallelistic forms of metaphorical modeling are quite common in Hebrew poetry. When, for instance, in the Torah's beautiful love poem entitled The Song Of Songs8, the lover says that:
I gathered my myrrh with spice,
ate my honeycomb with honey.
he is implying that both of these acts are analogous to the sexual act and, therefore, to each other, in some respect. And finally, zeugma, a form of brachology in which two nouns use the same modifier or verb when this is appropriate to only one of the nouns, is a sort of counter-analogy. Bob Dylan, in his beautiful little song The Three Angels,9 gives the line:
The dogs and pigeons fly up and they flutter around,
invoking images of winged dogs fluttering about, as if dogs and pigeons were analogous. Certainly, the analogy is not serious, but it seems to be intentional and is undeniably evocative.
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