Four quatrains, four ordinary things (an empty house, morning birdsong, a song, a girl in a corner) and one habit of mind running through them: look at what is in front of you and ask what else it is saying. The poem is called "Metaphors", and it works as a quick, informal lesson in reading the world this way. Its central idea is that everyday sights carry messages about loss, time and identity, and that those messages grow more personal as the poem goes on.
That movement shows in the pronouns. Stanza one speaks of "they", a family we never meet. Stanza two turns to "you", as the birds "Tell you about a clock". Stanza three offers the speaker's own opinion: "I think it would be a song." By stanza four the subject is "yourself". The poem begins with a distant absence and ends at the reader's own reflection.
The first stanza is the most striking. The house is a metaphor "of a family gone away", so an empty building stands in for the people who aren't in it, and absence becomes something you can see. The speaker shrugs ("Where they went? Who knows"), and the shrug is chilling because the next line shuts the door: "they are gone to stay." The phrase twists the familiar "here to stay" into its mirror image, and the plain, short words make the loss sound final.
Stanza two does something clever by never using the word "metaphor" at all. It simply performs one, turning birdsong into a clock. The clock's hands move "in inches per hour", an odd measurement that borrows from distance to describe time and makes each hour feel slow and physical. The last line then reverses that feeling: "still they never stop." Time crawls, but it cannot be halted. Birds have no hands, so the image slides quickly from animal to machine, and the poem trusts the reader to follow.
The song stanza links back to the others. A song is made of seconds, like the clock, and it echoes the singing birds. Here the rhythm carries the meaning. "Enjoyable evey second" is a long, tumbling line, and "But never very long" is short and ends just as the song does. The line is as brief as the pleasure it describes.
The rhyme scheme is loose and ballad-like. Only the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme (away/stay, clock/stop, song/long, yourself/shelf), and the lines have about three beats each. The unrhymed lines leave small gaps that the rhyming ones close with a click. The punctuation is rough: commas sit at line ends where a full stop or nothing would be expected, and a couple of words are misspelled. These slips give the poem an unpolished, spoken feel, as though someone is thinking aloud. The final stanza also ends on a comma. That may be an accident, but judging by the text it suits a poem about things that don't finish, because the sentence is left open.
That last stanza is the knottiest. "A pretty face to look at, / But more than a trophy on the shelf" seems to say that you are more than your appearance, more than something displayed and admired. A trophy sits still, and the image contrasts with the moving hands of the clock and the passing notes of the song. The girl in the corner may be watched, but the poem insists she is not an object.
Its significance lies in how plainly it does what it says. It names the technique, demonstrates it, and moves from loss to time to life to self in only sixteen lines. Nothing in the text tells us who wrote it or why, but it needs no backstory. For a student reader it is a clear, approachable example of how a metaphor works: one thing stands in for another, and the thing it stands for is usually bigger and more human than the thing you can see.