Metaphors play a significant role in poems by enlivening ordinary language, encouraging interpretation, and by giving maximum meaning with a minimum amount of words. The metaphors used in the poems "Moving In Winter" , written by Adrienne Rich, and "The Flea", written by John Donne, use metaphors that not only fulfill the roles already listed, but perform an even more vital role in poems by setting incredible tone, imagery, and symbolism.
             "Moving In Winter" contains very descriptive metaphors that signal the feelings of seperation, discontentment, and coldness. The metaphors not only display a line by line story that describes the couple's wintry move, but also the winter move symbolically expresses the couple's relationship. The narrator compares one's life and a pack of cards in the first line, "Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards, is carried piecemeal through the snow". This metaphor gives a reader a new outlook on life. A Deck of cards consist of vital roles. Compared to a family, the husband would play the role of the king, the wife the role of the queen, and the children would play the role of the jacks. This leaves only the numerical cards, which would make up daily events that would be faced. An unplayed deck of cards is considered not alive.
            
             Rich's use of metaphors also gave an exciting twist in his poem. In "Moving In Winter", a couple's relationship is compared to pieces of furniture. "Bureaus coffining from the cold, things that can shuffle in a drawer", brings to mind a bureau much like a coffin except containing minor details of life rolling back and forth in the drawer, as it is carried out of the old house.
             Much like "Moving In Winter", "The Flea" uses metaphors to examine a man pleadi
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