wrath of God, look/feel like the

Look a mess, feel miserable. Originally the wrath of God literally meant the anger of the Almighty, and it appears a number of times in the New Testament. Likening it to human appearance or feelings, however, dates only from the twentieth century. W. R. Duncan used it in The Queen’s Messenger (1982), “Are you ill? You look like the wrath of God.” It has largely replaced a late nineteenth-century synonym, to look like the wreck of the Hesperus, which alludes to a once very popular poem of 1841, “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (it describes an actual shipwreck off the New England coast).