A central disagreement concerns what the word “death” denotes. In one analysis, death remains its ordinary referent while a predator’s feature is figuratively attributed to it; imagined attribution is then central.
Another formulation rhetorically claims that death belongs to the class of predators. That claimed classification must not be mistaken for literal linguistic convention or physical zoology.
The reading affects both how implicit metaphor is located and how the expression “claws” is classified.