The speaker of "Epilogue" uses metaphors to help illustrate his ideas about life, hope, and death.
First, in line 2, he uses the phrase "set your fancies free." "Fancies" refers to one's imaginative powers. To "set your fancies free," then, means to let your mind wander. This often happens in the middle of the night, the speaker says, when the world is quiet and all the distractions of daily life—work, family, responsibilities—fade into the background.
The metaphor essentially depicts people's minds as being held captive during the day and only let loose at night. (Symbolically, "midnight" also brings to mind the end of one's life, reflecting the notion that the speaker is looking back on his life from his deathbed.) The speaker builds on the metaphor by envisioning those "fancies" as akin to wind or some other element that can smoothly "pass" over the earthly world. The mind, here, is like an actual, physical landscape through which people's thoughts travel.
In a way, this free-fancies metaphor subtly echoes the speaker's conception of death. The speaker insists that the dead are not "imprisoned" in their graves; it follows that death is a kind of release from life "on earth." In death, perhaps, the soul is "set [...] free" much like those "fancies" are once the din of waking life quiets down.
The speaker returns to this metaphor in a way in the poem's final stanza, when he encourages his listener to happily greet "the unseen"—that is, death/the unknown—"at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time." Thoughts of death shouldn't be relegated to "midnight in the silence of the sleep-time" but rather embraced with clear-eyed courage.
There are some other, subtler metaphors throughout the poem as well. The speaker describes tackling adversity using language related to military conflict, for example, as in:
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
[...]
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
With this language, the speaker presents life itself as a kind of battle that one should approach like a brave soldier. The speaker subtly personifies "right" and "wrong" here as well, imagining these abstract concepts as engaged in an epic fight. The language in the poem's final moments reiterates this idea, as the speaker urges those who have lost someone to tell the dead (or, perhaps, death itself):
"Strive and thrive!" [...] "Speed,—fight on, fare ever
There as here!"
All this figurative language makes both life and death seem like a grand adventure, filled with obstacles that people must confront head-on.
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