Drawing connections between seemingly unconnected concepts can render truly uncanny results! For example, interpreting Shakespeare's Sonnet 93, I found the best connections in Professor Banchoff' Beyond the Third Dimension, on, of all places, page 93, where the concept of mathematical duality is discussed in great detail. As if that weren't astounding enough, I proceeded to look up 'simile' in Richard A. Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and, of course, on page 93 found the following definition:

One thing is likened to another, dissimilar thing by the use of like, as etc.;
distinguished from metaphor in that the comparison is made explicit,
thy beauty grows "like" Eve's apple.
From Aristotle onward, simile is often the vehicle for Icon or Imago,
that is, a thing that represents something else.

Mathematically speaking, objects that are dual (as an octahedron and a cube) offer illuminating ways of constructing somewhat dissimilar objects (like a regular dodecahedron) in much the same way that simile, as a literary device, offers a comparison of two unlike things as a vehicle for better expression of one concept or idea, of one that is deducible from the two.

Using this standard, we can interpret the Shakespeare's couplet more visually, and regard the one concept, thy beauty, as an octahedron and regard the larger comparison, Eve's apple, as its cubical dual. In this way, a comparison which incorporates the mathematical ideology of duality, as does simile, broadens the way one thinks of an object which an author is trying to better describe. If we picture the octahedron inside its cubical dual, we see that they are mathematically related, that is, constructible in a similar fashion, and yet quite different-looking in reality. Similarly, we can regard "how thy beauty grows" inside the figurative confines of its being "like Eve's apple" and start to really 'see' the connections. Shakespeare uses simile in an especially clever manner, that is, with at least some kind of intuitive sense about the mathematical devices underlying the tool.

His aim is to represent the concept of someone's beauty as growing. So in using simile, he places that concept of beauty 'inside' a dualistic comparison of something larger, or more imaginatively abstract, in this case, Eve's apple. The concept of beauty works like the octahedron and the concept to which it is related, Eve's apple, works like its dual. Shakespeare's ingenious literary technique, when explained mathematically, becomes amazingly complex and effective. Not only does his incorporation of the duality in simile better help him articulate the beauty he describes, but it actually 'expands' the beauty mathematically and, in dual literary terms, represents how it is really growing. As mathematical duals help us better understand the individual objects and their separate constructions, literary simile helps us understand one object, or concept, in terms of the other. This results in a better understanding of each, as part of the process, as well. In terms of this course, the literary technique of simile works to expand an author's concepts to new dimensions. Interestingly, these dimensions lie in dual realms as well, that is, the mathematical and the literary, both amazingly imaginative, but rooted in a similarly profound reality.