What is a metaphor in Spring by William Shakespeare?

Answer 1

Well, you should know that what has been put in your school poetry book as "Spring" by William Shakespeare is in fact the first verse of a song written for the play Love's Labour's Lost, and sung by all the stupid characters of the play to demonstrate how stupid people cannot tell bad song lyrics from good ones. As is clearly true of whoever edited your school poetry book.

There are no metaphors in the verse, but there is a dirty joke. The cuckoo (a kind of bird) sometimes lays its eggs in the nest of other birds, who then take the trouble to hatch out the young cuckoo. The same sort of thing happens if a married woman has an affair with someone other than her husband, and then gets pregnant with her lover's child. In Shakespeare's day, married men were ridiculously worried that their wives were going to have sex with some other guy. Husbands whose wives were cheating were called "cuckolds" which clearly is related to the word "cuckoo". This is why the poem says that husbands fear the cuckoo.