The disagreement is not over which visible words occur in “the claws of death”; those are evident. It concerns the exact theoretical locus of the trope: a mentally borrowed predator image, a fictive attribute ascribed to death, or an act of conceptual predication performed by the speaker.
Thus “Where is the implicit metaphor?” and “What exactly is imaginative metaphor?” can receive different technical answers in different schools of rhetoric.
The general communicated meaning remains clear: death's irresistible grip is portrayed through the claws of a predator. The scholarly value of the disagreement lies in distinguishing lexical transfer from the creation of a figurative mental scene.