زَيْدٌ أَسَدٌ
“Zayd is a lion.”
The sentence strongly attributes courage to Zayd, but two analytical perspectives must be distinguished. If both the compared subject and the model of comparison remain explicit, the construction may be analyzed as an intensive simile. A lexical-metaphor analysis, by contrast, must account for what meaning “asad” is employed to convey.
“I saw Zayd as a lion” similarly names both the person and the lion-description. Its grammar and rhetorical force have to be read together. Omitting “like” is not in itself a sufficient universal criterion for classifying every bold comparison as metaphor.