I need help finding metaphors in this text.


Gatsby's house was still empty when I left - the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One
of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a
minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the
night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own.
I didn't want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train. I spent my Saturday nights in
New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still
hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and
down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps.
But I didn't investigate.
Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know
that the party was over. On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went
over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an
obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I
erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and
sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the
shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential
houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once
for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that
had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
human dreams; for a transitory chanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence
of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face
to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.