What is an example of metaphor in the book, After Sappho?

Late in the novel, Virginia Woolf proposes that “a novel ought to run alongside [life itself] the way the shadow of a railway carriage travels over the landscape. Now rising fleetingly along a low wall, now falling away into a riverbed, passing its silhouette unevenly over grass and gravel: that was a novel…” (193). Here, Virginia relies entirely on metaphorical language in her description of the novel. The use of metaphor suggests a poetic element, as if Virginia cannot describe the novelistic ideal in direct and explicit terms. However, her flighty, oblique language mirrors her very conception of the novelistic form. She believes that art should transcend, in some sense, language itself; art should imitate “life itself” (193), which is complex, infinite, and deeply inarticulable. Schwartz’s language, which is itself often ambiguous and poetic, actualizes this belief by prioritizing tone and emotional truth over explanation and literal description.