Meaning & Analysis
The phrase compares something or someone’s speed to lightning, suggesting extraordinary swiftness or rapidity.
Insights
Sudden Action
The proverb metaphorically represents decisions or actions taken with abruptness or minimal deliberation. Like a flash of lightning, these moments come and go in an instant, often driven by passion, urgency, or instinct.
Unstoppable Force
Lightning, in its sheer power and inevitability, becomes a metaphor for irresistible energy or fate. The phrase suggests a force that moves forward with such momentum that nothing can stand in its way.
Vivid Emotional Response
It also captures the immediacy of powerful emotional reactions—anger, revenge, or love—that erupt with the sudden, blinding force of lightning.
Classical and Mythological Symbolism
Lightning has long been associated with divine or cosmic intervention, from Zeus and Jupiter to the Biblical God. In literature, swiftness tied to lightning often suggests destiny, judgment, or vengeance coming with divine sanction or authority.
Renaissance Theater and Heroism
In early modern drama, characters often declared intentions or actions to be 'as swift as lightning' to express noble urgency, violent passion, or inevitable revenge. The metaphor emphasized intensity and inevitability, aligning human action with natural forces.
Psychological Impulse
The proverb evokes the psychology of sudden reactions—those not mediated by reason but governed by emotion or instinct. It dramatizes the immediacy of will, highlighting moments where cognition is eclipsed by impulse.
Rhetorical Devices
Simile
The phrase explicitly compares swiftness to lightning using 'as,' grounding abstract qualities in vivid natural imagery.
Hyperbole
The comparison to lightning amplifies the idea of speed to a supernatural degree, enhancing dramatic effect and emotional urgency.
Symbolism
Lightning symbolizes not just speed, but sudden illumination, danger, and divine intervention, lending the phrase deeper resonance beyond physical velocity.
Transcription
Quotations
My selfe, as swift as thunder or his spouse, Will hunt occasion with a secret hate, To work false Ammon an vngracious end.
Revenge as swift as lightning bursteth forth, And cleaves his heart.
I am prompt As lightning to your service, o my Lord!
Swifter then Ioues lightning, my fierce vengeance Shall crosse Euenus.
Which when I heard, as swift as lightning I search't the regions of the vpper world.
Be swift as Lightning.
Swift as lightning he came on.
If your answer be, That you can love me, be it swift as lightning.
(the lightning).
Shakespeare Citations
Their weapons like to lightning came and went.
Brief as the lightning in the collied night.
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say ‘It lightens.’
And to't they go like lightning.
Be swift like lightning in the execution.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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