"It is very awkward," Mr. Alabaster said, and then suddenly I knew his look. It was the look of a man who can't pay for a drink. "By God," I thought, "I believe the Professor is broke."
So I took an inventory of the smart young gentleman and there was a piece of his shirt sticking out of his trousers, a little piece no bigger than a sixpence but blue as the North star. Indication to mariners. And when I looked longer I saw that his shiny brown boots were down on one side like torpedoed ships. There was a fringe on the back of his trousers like old flags after the battle and the breeze, and his collar had an edge like a splintered mast.
- from The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
...the swift deployment of such a field of simile does suggest a deeper involvement with and interest in the formal qualities of language and literature than might be otherwise immediately apparent in this book. To me, at least. Keep on the lookout.
To extend via comparison: while it's tired to harp on the current state of classroom-based education of writing, I'll still suggest it's hard to imagine a paragraph as sublime and illustrative as the preceding surviving a contemporary workshop critique session. Are there writers today who can use figurative, almost to the point of bordering on becoming (but not actually becoming) symbolic, language in such a way and get away with it?
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