Oh, for the depth and height, and heft and pivot, the vibe and wiggle and shudder and click, and the exhilaration and trance of poetry -— my dear aMPU. You say “it’s a metaphor” as if that’s a bad thing. As if you were flicking away a bit of lint.
No. I am saying it is a metaphor and by definition is not meant to be a complete or perfect representation.
It is a way of expressing the unfamiliar by comparison to the familiar. It does not mean the two are identical in every way.
A metaphor is a trope or figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. Adjective: metaphorical.A metaphor is said to express the unfamiliar (the tenor) in terms of the familiar (the vehicle). When Neil Young sings, "Love is a rose," "rose" is the vehicle for "love," the tenor. (In cognitive linguistics, the terms target and source are roughly equivalent to tenor and vehicle.)