Melville, Moby-Dick (1851): "a damp, drizzly November in my soul." What does the figure do that "I feel sad" would not?

Dickinson, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (1929): "The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—" Which effect does the simile create?

Shakespeare, Hamlet (1604): "But look, the morn in russet mantle clad." What is gained by personifying morning this way?

Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): "The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky." What does the image emphasize?

Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855): "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." What does the phrase add to the speaker's voice?

Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" (1918): "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." Which connotation does "charged" carry?

Poe, "The Raven" (1845): "each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor." What does this figure do?

Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895): "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer." What is the simile's effect?

Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (1953): "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." What does the reversal intensify?

Morrison, Beloved (1987): "124 was spiteful." What is the effect of giving the house this adjective?

Melville, Moby-Dick (1851): "Call me Ishmael." What is the phrase doing at once?

Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1945): "Success in Circuit lies." What double meaning is active in "Circuit"?

Shakespeare, Macbeth (1623): "False face must hide what the false heart doth know." How does "false" work twice?

Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850): "the scarlet letter was her passport." What two meanings does "passport" hold here?

Douglass, Narrative (1845): "a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." What does "made" do twice?

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925): "a fresh, green breast of the new world." Which layered meaning does "green" carry?

Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915): "There will be time, there will be time." Why is the repetition double-edged?

Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929): "Caddy smelled like trees." Why is the phrase more than simple description?

Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927): "had melted away into a blue haze." What does "melted" do?

Cather, My Ántonia (1918): "the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running." What is the phrase doing?

Melville, Moby-Dick (1851): "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed." Which reading preserves the metaphor's tension?

Dickinson, "The Brain" (1896): "The brain is wider than the sky... / The one the other will include." Which reading keeps the metaphor complex?

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597): "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." Which reading avoids flattening the metaphor?

Hopkins, "Pied Beauty" (1918): "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings." Which reading keeps the compound image alive?

Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): "soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees." What does the metaphor hold together?

Whitman, "A noiseless patient spider" (1868): "Till the bridge you will need be form'd." What reading best preserves the extended metaphor?

Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839): "vacant eye-like windows." Which reading keeps the Gothic metaphor complex?

Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895): "He was a slang phrase." What does this metaphor do?

Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917): "The blackbird whistling / Or just after." Which reading preserves the ambiguity?

Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1920): "The falcon cannot hear the falconer." Which reading keeps the metaphor's scale?