Hello!

I just discoverd this page when I was looking for information about metaphors in poetry - and I hope to find some help here. I am looking for some interesting poems to analyse in regards of metaphor - especially metaphors of life, time and death.

I've already got Robert Frost (The Road not taken, After Apple-Picking), Bunyan (The Pilgrim's Progress), Dylan Thoms (Do Not Go To Gentle into That Good Night) Tennyson (Crossing the Bar) Allen Tate (The Last Days of Alice) Andrew Marvell (To His Coy Mistress) Tennyson (All things must die)and Emily Dickinson's coachman.

I would be very glad if you could help me to find some more poems with meatphors of life, time and death.

Thank you very much,
Alexandra.

Here's an old favourite with plenty of life and death, and with metaphors in the last line of the second stanza and the first three lines of the last stanza:

'The War Song of the Saracens'
by James Elroy Flecker

We are they who come faster than fate: we are they who ride early or late;
We storm at your ivory gate: Pale Kings of the Sunset, beware!
Not on silk nor in samet we lie, not in curtained solemnity die
Among women who chatter and cry, and children who mumble a prayer.
But we sleep by the ropes of the camp, and we rise with a shout, and we tramp
With the sun or the moon for a lamp, and the spray of the wind in our hair.

From the lands, where the elephants are, to the forts of Merou and Balghar,
Our steel we have brought and our star to shine on the ruins of Rum.
We have marched from the Indus to Spain, and, by God, we will go there again;
We have stood on the shore of the plain where the Waters of Destiny boom.
A mart of destruction we made at Jelula where men were afraid,
For death was a difficult trade, and the sword was a broker of doom;

And the Spear was a Desert Physician who cured not a few of ambition,
And drave not a few to perdition with medicine bitter and strong;
And the shield was a grief to the fool and as bright as a desolate pool,
And as straight as the rock of Stamboul when their cavalry thundered along:
For the coward was drowned with the brave when our battle sheered up like a wave,
And the dead to the desert we gave, and the glory to God in our song.

Neutral Tones - Thomas Hardy

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.