Speaking Like Yoda
“The Porcupine” dangles a simile over the waters of literary devices like anastrophe and hyperbaton by reversing the natural order of sentence structure:
“Like lightning down the road I ran
Until I reached the sweet-shop man.”
Such a Good Girl
The narrator who speaks of running like lightning is a sweet little golden-haired girl who has the unfortunate luck to settle her bottom upon a rock which turns out to be a porcupine. Such a divinely sweet little girl. She only earns his allowance when she has not been bad and opens her tale with a metaphorical underlining how just how not-bad she’d been:
“This week my parents had been told
That I had been as good as gold.”
The Enormous Toad
In another book, Dahl tells the story of The Enormous Crocodile. Most of the beasts in this collection remain standardized in size, though certainly other miraculous absurdities impact upon their lives. The exception is one-half of the titular duo in “The Toad and the Snail” whose unusual size is conveyed through simile:
“Now yesterday, quite suddenly,
A giant toad came up to me.
This toad was easily as big
As any fair-sized fattish pig.”
“The Tummy Beast”
This poem takes the concept of metaphor to the most extensive degree in the book. Rather than singular examples which can be extricated from the verse, the entire subject of the poem’s narrative is metaphorical in nature. At least at first, before the surprising climax reveals a distinctly literal component. “The Tummy Beast” is a metaphor for gluttony; it is the compulsive, uncontrollabe urge to eat, the hungry stomach's grumble personified.
Wonderland: The World of Imagination
The ending of “The Toad and the Snail” is also a revelation of larger-scale metaphor at work. It is one of the longest selections in the book, spanning eight pages accompanied by illustration. In fact, one might well call it the epic story in the collection as that toad the size of a fat pig carries a young boy from Scotland to France where the toad has been forced to transform into an equally enormous snail to avoid becoming part of the dining platter for the French who will eat just about anything. By the end of the tale, another transformation has left the boy riding atop a Roly-Poly Bird. His finals words indicate that his wild ride has really been a metaphor for the power of imagination:
“But you and I know well it’s true
We know I jumped, we know I flew.
We’re sure it all place, although
Not one of us will ever know,
We’ll never, never understand
Why children go to Wonderland.”
