Once more: to return to Shelley—
“Winter came; the wind was his whip
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills,
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles,
His breath was a chain that without a sound
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven in his chariot-throne
By the ten-fold blasts of the arctic zone.”
Here is not only metaphor, but personification so strong and vivid that it is only kept from passing into mythology by the conscious and reflective character of the age in which it was created.