The poem "The cat and the Moon" by William Butler Yeats uses figurative language to create meaning.
These are some of the ways in which the poem communicates meaning, for example, at the starting of the poem, we get an image of the cat's movements, in comparison to the moon's movements: "The cat went here and there / And the moon spun round like a top". They are both moving, while the cat moves here and there the moon spins. The metaphor "the moon spun round like a top" means that the moon is changing its phases, it never stops moving. In this way the poem communicates the themes of the poem: change, movement. Light always changes to dark.
The poem also describes the moon's whiteness and the cat's blackness, they are complimentary but opposite. The cat stares at the moon, the moon from a distance affects the cat, the moon is also affected by the cat's dance: "Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance? /When two close kindred meet, /What better than call a dance? /Maybe the moon may learn, /Tired of that courtly fashion, /A new dance turn." The moon makes the cat visible through its reflected light and in an opposite movement, the cat's blackness will soon take over the moon when it goes into another phase. Full moon into crescent moon. The dance described by Yeats is a metaphor to describe this process where one is affected by the other, the celestial world and the terrestrial world.