We had been on the road for six hours, but it felt like sixty given the appalling surface.
I was now worried that we wouldn’t arrive before nightfall, and my fears weren’t helped by the driver’s eccentric behaviour.
Explanation:
The phrases above are two examples of complex phrases that can be found in the text.
A complex sentence is one that is formed by an independent clause and one or two dependent clauses. As you may already know, dependent clauses are those that cannot convey a complete thought on their own and therefore need a complement to make sense, unlike the independent clauses that can conclude a thought and convey a complete meaning without the need for complement.
I would just explain to them how poetry is a way of writing in order to capture physical and emotional details unable to be written in factual writing. Hope this helps :-)