How Does Billy Collins Use Metaphors In Nine Horses

What is time? Time is the, “Duration in which all things happen.”(dictionary.com) Billy Collins, in the book “Nine Horses” uses literary elements such as similes and metaphors to convey the motifs of time passing, pain, love, and reality vs. imagination. In the book, “Nine Horses,”Billy Collins uses similes to convey the passing of time. When a person is missing from the world, such as Eric Dolphy, does, “Anyone sense something when another Eric Dolphy lifetime was added to the span of his life, when we all took another full Dolphy step forward in time, flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick again? It would have been so subtle like the moment at the exact center of your life of as you crossed the equator at night in a boat.”(Collins 51) The motif of the passing of time is represented as a simile by comparing the center of your life to an equator. Passing one day of your life or one year may be nothing but all those days and years combined together can create a lifetime. Half of your life can pass by right before your eyes just like passing across the equator can occur at a fraction of a second. Billy Collins in the book, “Nine Horses,” uses literary elements
imagination. Creatures were everywhere, “One frowning from a chair-back, another howling from my mother’s silent bureau, locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak. I would see these presences, too, in a swirling pattern of wallpaper of in the various greens of a porcelain lamp, each looked so melancholy so damned, some peering out at me as if they knew all the secrets of a secretive boy.” (Collins 49) As a child, your imagination creates creatures out of everyday items. In reality, these creatures are just fragments of your imagination. Sometimes those imaginary creatures give you company but other times they frighten you. Children can’t distinguish between reality and imagination which frightens