Metaphors In The Library Poem

In the poem “In The Library” by Charles Simic, there once used to be angels, but they have disappeared, and there are books written about them. Only one person knows the secret that lies inside these books. Books are full of wonder and creativity, but their magic has been a victim of the passing of time. Only a few people know the wonder and creativity of books. Simic uses metaphors and shifts throughout the poem to create this theme. The purpose of metaphors in “In the Library” is to represent the wonder and creativity of books as angels who are being forgotten. At the start of the poem, the first stanza says “There’s a book called A Dictionary of Angels” a book which has not been published in fifty years. A dictionary is a book that contains
This dictionary has been forgotten by the world, and the important knowledge and creativity of this dictionary is being forgotten. The narrator mentions how they had discovered that the angels were once plentiful but had disappeared, as well as the knowledge of their existence. “The angels were once as plentiful as species of flies” This sentence is a metaphor that talks about the avoidance of the “angels”, but it talks in past tense as if now the angels aren't as plentiful or they have disappeared. This shows how wonder exists but is being forgotten by the people of the world. The narrator also uses a metaphor to show the current status of the angels. “Angels and Gods huddled” in a quiet library, they are afraid of what is happening to them. Once loved mystical creatures are forgotten in a quiet place. The purpose of one of the shifts in “In the Library” is to create a sense of time, and the changes that happen during the time of the poem. The first one happens at the start of the poem, switching from present to past, back to the present. This is done by the narrator using different tenses in different stanzas. In the first stanza, the narrator uses the pronoun “I”, which is a present-tense
In the third stanza, the narrator comes back to the present tense by saying, “Now the sun is shining”. The important word is now because it makes the statement present tense. These shifts in time show how there used to be “angels” (wonder in books) but now this wonder has disappeared. It gives you a sense of a timeline of what happened, and what is the current situation. The second shift is the change from talking about the angels to talking about the people who know the magic inside books. During the fourth stanza, the narrator starts to talk about the librarian who knows about the secrets that lie inside the books. It mentions how “she keeps her head tipped as if listening” and “I hear nothing, but she does”. The “she” that these quotes mention is Miss Jones, the librarian. She knows the secrets that lie inside the books because she’s always surrounded by books, so she listens to their stories. This shift in the poem is important because it gives you the sense that the knowledge of this wonder isn't lost. There are still people out there who know the secrets that lie inside these books. The metaphors and the two shifts in the poem “In the Library” by Charles Simic, show how books have wonder inside of