Metaphor Examples for Advanced Readers
The light flows into the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.
Men court not death when there are sweets still left in life to taste.
In capitalism, money is the life blood of society but charity is the soul.
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare, / And heaven but as the
highway for a shell,
5
Fame is the fragrance of heroic deeds, / Of flowers of chivalry and not of
weeds!
6
So I sit spinning still, round this decaying form, the fine threads of rare
and subtle thought.
7
And swish of rope and ring of chain /Are music to men who sail the main.
Still sits the school-house by the road, a ragged beggar sunning.
The child was our lone prayer to an empty sky.
10 Blind fools of fate and slaves of circumstance, / Life is a fiddler, and we all
must dance.
11 Grind the gentle spirit of our meek reviews into a powdery foam of salt
abuse.
12 Laugh a drink from the deep blue cup of sky.
13 Think now: history has many cunning passages and contrived corridors.
14 You are now in London, that great sea whose ebb and flow at once is deaf
and loud,
15 His fine wit makes such a wound that the knife is lost in it.
16 Waves of spam emails inundated his inbox.
17 In my hearts temple I suspend to thee these votive wreaths of withered
memory.
18 He cast a net of words in garish colours wrought to catch the idle buzzers
of the day.
19 This job is the cancer of my dreams and aspirations.
20 This song shall be thy rose, soft, fragrant, and with no thorn left to wound
thy bosom.
21 There, one whose voice was venomed melody.
22 A sweetness seems to last amid the dregs of past sorrows.
23 So in this dimmer room which we call life,
24 Life is the night with its dream-visions teeming, / Death is the waking at
day.
25 Then the lips relax their tension and the pipe begins to slide, /Till in little
clouds of ashes,it falls softly at his side.
26 The olden days: when thy smile to me was wine, golden wine thy word of
praise.
27 Thy tones are silver melted into sound.
28 Under us the brown earth / Ancient and strong, / The best bed for
wanderers;
29 Love is a guest that comes, unbidden, / But, having come, asserts his
right;
30 My House of Life is weather-stained with years.
31 See the sun, far off, a shrivelled orange in a sky gone black;
32 Three pines strained darkly, runners in a race unseen by any.
33 But the rare herb, Forgetfulness, it hides away from me.
34 The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman
35 Life: a lighted window and a closed door.
36 Some days my thoughts are just cocoons hanging from dripping branches
in the grey woods of my mind.
37 Men and women pass in the street glad of the shining sapphire weather.
38 The swan existing is a song with an accompaniment.
39 At night the lake is a wide silence, without imagination.
40 The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume.
41 The great gold apples of light hang from the streets long bough, dripping
their light on the faces that drift below, on the faces that drift and blow.
42 From its blue vase the rose of evening drops.
43 When in the mines of dark and silent thought / Sometimes I delve and find
strange fancies there,
44 The twigs were set beneath a veil of willows.
45 He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail, / Thinking that comfort
was a fairy tale,
46 O Moon, your light is failing and you are nothing now but a bow.
47 Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, / A naked runner lost in a
storm of spears.
48 This world of life is a garden ravaged.
49 And therefore I went forth, with hope and fear / Into the wintry forest of
our life;
50 My soul was a lampless sea and she was the tempest.
