Question

This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the
peasant,
who painted herself a present—
wildflowers entwining the plaster corset
her spine resides in, that flaming pillar—
this priestess in the romance of mirrors.

Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the
footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walks of the
garden, Diego’s
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.

–“Sonnet in Primary Colors,”
Rita Dove

What type of figurative language is the underlined text?
metaphor

How does this figurative language contribute to the meaning of the poem?

Answer 1

Yes — it’s a metaphor.

How it contributes:
- A metaphor collapses complex ideas into a single striking image, and here those images do a lot of work: they make Frida’s physical pain, emotional life, politics, and art inseparable and immediately felt.
- For example, “Diego’s love a skull…” turns love into death—showing the relationship as obsession, wound, and haunting presence rather than comfort. “Celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead” makes memory and fame cinematic and ghostly, emphasizing how the past and ideology patrol her nights. The plaster corset and “flaming pillar” of her spine compress injury and strength into one paradoxical object (imprisonment + source of power).
- Overall, the metaphors intensify the poem’s tone (sacred, painful, mythic), compress Frida’s biography into emblematic symbols, and let the reader feel the mingled beauty and brutality that define her life and art.