Symbol

Definition: object or action that represents another object, action, idea, or emotion

Example:

The Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

The dead symbolizes the forgotten. As long as the memory of the person remains in the mind of a person they are considered alive. Men have stopped dying because their memories have been kept and preserved, and death can only collect the souls of the dead. Those whose memory has been lost from the mind of the living, tossed away.

Significance: Symbols create the extra depth in a poem making readers more enveloped in the ideas and concepts.