What is a good poem from a well-known poet, that has easily understood similes & metaphors?

Question

I am looking for a good poem, from a well-known poet that contains easily interpretable similes and metaphors. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

From Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
My Bed is a Boat:


My bed is like a little boat;
Nurse helps me in when I embark;
She girds me in my sailor's coat
And starts me in the dark.

At night I go on board and say
Good-night to all my friends on shore;
I shut my eyes and sail away
And see and hear no more.

And sometimes things to bed I take,
As prudent sailors have to do;
Perhaps a slice of wedding-cake,
Perhaps a toy or two.

All night across the dark we steer;
But when the day returns at last,
Safe in my room beside the pier,
I find my vessel fast.

Answer 2

Well Known Similes

Answer 3

Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred" is a powerful poem with a series of evocative metaphors/similes.

Answer 4

Any of Edgar Allen Poe's stuff really,
this is one of his
, "a dream within a dream."

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Answer 5

Any poem by William Blake

Answer 6

Robert Frost:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Answer 7

i guess you can look at
Ode to autumn by John Keats
or then at poems like Daffodils or The solitary reaper by William Wordsworth...

Answer 8

A number of Shakespeare's Sonnets, as he is often comparing his love to something else. The conceits are great.

Answer 9

"How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I don't think the metaphors are too hard to understand.

Answer 10

"the road not taken" by robert frost
peace