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?

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

Answer 1

I don’t see which words are underlined in your message — could you tell me which line or quote you mean?

Meanwhile, here are brief identifications and readings for a few likely candidates from the poem; one of these may match your underlined text:

1) “one black wing / perched over her eyes”
- Type: metaphor (with personification — the wing “perches”).
- How it contributes: compresses mourning, blindness, or a shadow of grief into a single vivid image. It makes sorrow a physical, avian presence that covers her sight, suggesting both protection and oppression and introducing the poem’s tone of pain and elegy.

2) “the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead”
- Type: metaphor (and an image that functions like a metaphor/metonymy linking film/photos to butterflies).
- How it contributes: compares film/photographic images of the dead to delicate butterflies — fragile, fluttering, preserved but unreal. It emphasizes memory, artifice, and the haunted beauty of images that both animate and distance the deceased.

3) “Diego’s / love a skull in the circular window / of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.”
- Type: metaphor (a striking conceit).
- How it contributes: equates Diego’s love with a skull — a symbol of death — making his presence ominous and inescapable. The “circular window” and “thumbprint searing her brow” add intimacy and violence; the image suggests that love has marked her permanently and that it is entwined with mortality and suffering.

4) “this priestess in the romance of mirrors”
- Type: metaphor.
- How it contributes: elevates Frida to a ritual, sacred figure of self-reflection and spectacle. It highlights themes of self-construction, worship of the self/image, and the almost religious seriousness of her relationship with mirrors and self-portraiture.

If you tell me which exact phrase is underlined, I’ll give a focused answer for that specific line.