It is consistent to say that “death” names death and “claws” calls to mind genuine claws, while recognizing that death has no such physical organ. The lexical meanings and the imaginative predication belong to different analytical levels.
For comparison, consider an invented phrase such as “the ears of a wall.” Its rhetorical analysis cannot be settled merely by spotting an impossible physical attribute; one must examine context and the explanatory school being used. The textbook's actual main witness is “the claws of death.”
The important precaution is not to infer automatically that each individual term must be a lexical metaphor merely because the complete attribution cannot be literally true.