Poetic idiom is the heart of poetry and surpasses verse form in importance. Comparison is pervasive in poetry, usually taking the form of metaphor or simile. Poets also employ personification, hyperbole (conscious exaggeration to express not literal truth but emotional truth), apostrophe, and allusion.
Poets think in images, avoiding abstraction, and the reader must experience a series of sensory things or actions. After experiencing an image, interpret it--its connotations, relevance to the topic of the poem, its affective meanings, and whether it is positive or negative in meaning in the context of a given passage. In the case of metaphor or simile, the reader has a double obligation or experience the literal level (God is a sun and shield) then interpret how God is a sun and shield.
(The Origin of the Bible: Newly Updated by F. F. Bruce, J. I. Packer, Philip W. Comfort, and Carl F. H. Henry, 2020. The Bible as Literature by Leland Ryken, Page 137-139)