Al-maniyyah — death, the target of comparison, explicitly named.
Al-sabuʿ — a predator, the source of comparison, not explicitly named.
Al-aẓfār — claws, a characteristic that points toward the unstated predator.
The claws do not relate to the two sides in the same way. A predator has physical claws; death does not. Their attribution to death is imaginary. That difference transforms a plain description into a figurative image.
If the predator were openly named and death explicitly compared with it, the resulting expression would be an overt simile, no longer the particular implicit construction under analysis here.