What is a metaphor example in poetry?

"The fog comes / on little cat feet." Carl Sandburg, "Fog" (1916). That is metaphor in poetry at its most compact: a trope (a figure of meaning, where one word stands for something other than itself) that says one thing is another, transferring the source's qualities onto the target. The fog is not like a cat. The poem says it is one, and the rest of the image (silent, sitting on its haunches, moving on) belongs to the fog automatically. Five sourced poems below show the figure at different scales, from Sandburg's twenty-two words to Donne's whole-poem extension. Two of the poems most often listed alongside them, including Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, are not metaphors at all.

Carl Sandburg, "Fog" (1916): the compressed image-metaphor

Sandburg gives the whole poem in twenty-two words:

The fog comes on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

The figure is metaphor by attribution. Not paws, but feet. And the cat is never named. There is no "like a cat," no "as if." The fog has feet, then the fog sits, then the fog has haunches, then the fog moves on. Each verb tightens the cat-shape without ever calling it a cat. The reader assembles the animal from the parts.

This is what "transferring the qualities of the source onto the target" looks like on the page. Sandburg picks the source (a cat: silent, low to the ground, indifferent) and lends those qualities to the target (urban fog) one bodily detail at a time. The metaphor is the poem. There is nothing left over once the cat is removed.

Did you know? Sandburg drafted "Fog" while waiting for a meeting near Chicago's Grant Park, and the original version compared the fog to a panther by name. He cut the named animal and left only the feet. The figure works because the reader supplies the cat. Source: Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (1991).

Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" (c. 1861): named-substitution metaphor

"Hope" is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul — And sings the tune without the words — And never stops — at all —

Dickinson does not say hope is like a bird. She says it is the thing with feathers, and then proceeds as if she had been talking about a bird the whole time. It perches. It sings. Later in the poem it is heard "in the chillest land" and is not asked for "a crumb." Once the metaphor is set, every action belongs to the bird and arrives back, by inference, at hope.

The placement of the named element is the only thing separating Dickinson's move from Sandburg's. Sandburg leaves the source (the cat) unnamed and lets it surface through its parts. Dickinson names the target (Hope) and lets the source (the bird) emerge feature by feature. Both poems are doing the same figure. They are choosing which side of the equation to keep visible.

Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors" (1959): chained metaphors for one subject

I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils.

Plath stacks nine metaphors for the same target, pregnancy, across nine lines, and never names it. The riddle of the title is also the riddle of the form: the figure here is not single substitution but accumulation. Each metaphor catches a different facet. The elephant is size. The house is weight, immobility. The melon strolling on two tendrils is the absurd geometry of a pregnant body, the round on top of the thin.

For a working writer this is the demonstration that one subject can carry many metaphors at once, provided each new image earns its place by adding something the previous ones did not. Repeat a facet twice and the chain goes slack. Plath's chain holds because no two metaphors do the same job.

Audre Lorde, "Coal" (1968): metaphor as the speaker's claim about herself

I Is the total black, being spoken From the earth's inside.

The figure is the same one Sandburg and Dickinson use, but the grammar shifts. The speaker is not described as something else by an outside narrator. She names herself as coal, in the first person, and the rest of the poem mines the figure: words coming up from compression, light produced under pressure, language as "diamonds in a knot of flame." The metaphor governs the poem because it is the speaker's claim about her own substance.

When the named target is "I," the political and personal stakes change. Sandburg's fog and Dickinson's hope are at arm's length; the speaker is naming the world. Lorde is naming herself, and the figure becomes an act of self-definition rather than description.

John Donne, "The Sun Rising" (1633): the metaphor sustained across a whole poem

She is all states, and all princes I. Nothing else is.

Donne's speaker says his lover is every nation and he is every ruler, and then the rest of the stanza behaves as if the claim were literally true. The bedroom is the whole world. The sun's job, demoted, is to circle the two of them. The metaphor does not sit in a single image. It governs an extended argument across the poem.

This opens onto the extended metaphor and the conceit, the names handbooks give to the figure once it stops being a single substitution and becomes the structural premise of a whole poem or stanza. The line between an extended metaphor and a metaphysical conceit is contested, and worth its own page. For the purposes of this list, what matters is that "The Sun Rising" shows what metaphor looks like when it stops being decorative and starts doing the argumentative work of the poem.

What gets called metaphor that actually isn't

Three poems show up under "metaphors in poetry" lists often enough that they need flagging.

Shakespeare, "Sonnet 18" (c. 1609), "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", is a simile, not a metaphor. The word compare makes the comparison explicit, and the sonnet then enumerates the ways the beloved is unlike a summer's day rather than collapsing the two terms into one. It is widely listed as a metaphor example. It is not.

Burns, "A Red, Red Rose" (1794), "O, my Luve is like a red, red rose," is the same shape. The word like puts it in simile. The poem is famous, the line is gorgeous, and it does not belong on a metaphor list.

Frost, "The Road Not Taken" (1916). The diverging roads are metaphor, and that part of the poem's reputation is earned. What it gets credit for that it does not deserve is the moral. The poem is read as praise for the less-traveled path. The speaker says the two roads "had worn them really about the same" and that he will tell the story "with a sigh," a posture, not a brag. The metaphor is real. The triumphant reading is a misreading.

What poetic metaphor does that prose metaphor usually doesn't

Three things show up in the five poems above that prose metaphor mostly does not do.

Compression. Sandburg gets cat, fog, motion, and silence in twenty-two words because the line break does part of the work that punctuation and connective tissue would do in prose. Poetic form lets the figure run without scaffolding.

Image-as-thought. Dickinson and Plath build the abstraction, hope or pregnancy, only out of the source-image, never glossing it. Prose metaphor usually gives both terms ("hope, that bird"). Poetic metaphor often hides one and lets the reader carry the equation.

Extension across the whole poem. Donne and Lorde let one metaphor govern every line. The figure is structural, not ornamental. In prose, a metaphor that sustained itself across a whole essay would read as a stunt. In a poem, it reads as the poem's reason for being.

In poetry, the metaphor is often the poem, not a moment inside it. Sandburg's "Fog" is six lines and one figure. Dickinson's bird is the whole stanza. Donne's lover is the world for as long as the speaker can hold the claim. Prose metaphor decorates an argument. Poetic metaphor often is the argument.