Metaphor in Poetry

Metaphor is originally a rhetorical term, like "anthropomorphism", "hyperbole" and "irony". Since the 1980s of the last century, due to the research discoveries of American scholars, especially due to the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's book "The Metaphors We Live By", "metaphor" has overflowed from rhetoric to become a popular term in cognitive linguistics. Metaphor" overflowed from rhetoric and became a buzzword in cognitive linguistics. Today, as the study of metaphor enters language teaching, computer theory, literary criticism, and other fields, the buzz surrounding the term continues.

As a rhetorical concept, metaphor can be traced back to Ancient Greece, referring to "'using the same thing to express another thing', a kind of 'from the other to the other' conversion" (Sun Yi, 2). " (Sun Yi, 293 Cognitive Metaphors - A Multidimensional Cross-Domain Study Peking University Press April 2013) In contemporary cognitive language research, the referent of metaphor has been enlarged as much as possible and given a new extension, becoming "a mapping relationship between two different concept domains, i.e., the projection of semantic features from simple concepts to complex concepts." (Liu Yuhong 124)

In terms of literature, poetry is the essence of language and highly artistic; and the most important feature of poetic language is that it transcends the references of ordinary vocabulary, and through the collision of words, it creates superimposed imagery that leads readers to a majestic, charming, dark, desperate, or enlightened realm that evokes the reader's recollection of early years, his or her comprehension of the real world, or the experience of the sublime or the tragic. Experience the sublime or tragic feelings.

? Poetry is not prose, does not directly tell the reader what is meant to be expressed; poets often use words as a step, to convey metaphors with imagery, unconsciously set up the source and target domains of the metaphors either explicitly or implicitly comparable and similar, to deepen the artistry of the poem. Without understanding this setting of the poem, one may stay on the surface of the language and be satisfied with the instantaneous comprehension of the specific imagery, thus ignoring the real intention behind the words and losing the possibility of dialoguing with the author at the level of thought.

? For poetry, the source metaphor of metaphor is imagery, i.e. words that express a certain image, and the target domain is another concept that has similar or similar characteristics to the source metaphor. The content expressed by the metaphor does not belong to the objective world, but to the world of schema, so if we want to understand the metaphor, we should not correspond the words containing the metaphor with the image of the objective world absolutely, but from the reference of the language, combined with the schema instantly produced by the brain, and on the basis of the imagery inspired by the linguistic symbols to form new associations. According to traditional semantics, the meaning of a word depends on its relation to the objective world, and when it corresponds to the objective world, its meaning is "true", otherwise it does not have a "true" value. However, as far as the understanding of metaphor is concerned, there is often no "true" relationship between words and the objective world. For example, a break in the relationship between two people in Chinese can be described as "they are now broken up". In the understanding of "hand", no one would regard it as a "real" hand in the objective world, because "break up" here is a metaphorical use, referring to the "break up" associated with "break up". The "breakup" is used metaphorically to refer to a different kind of scene associated with the "breakup".

? To illustrate the above statement, let us now read a small poem. The author of the poem is the famous American poet Robert Frost. The title of the poem is Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Whose woods these are I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

His house is in the village, though.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

? But I have promises to keep,

? And miles to go before I sleep,

? And miles to go before I sleep.

? Here is Jiang Feng's translation:

? I think I know whose forest this is,

? His family lives in that village over there;

? He won't see me stopping here,

? To see the snow cover his woods.

? My little horse, must have thought it strange,

? On this darkest night of the year,

? Between the woods and the frozen lake,

? Stopped in the wilds of the neighborhood with no farmhouse in sight.

? He shook the string of bells on his harness,

? Asking, as it were, if a mistake had been made.

? The other sound was just a breeze,

? and white flakes of snow.

? The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

? But I have promises to fulfill,

? And a few more miles to go before I sleep,

? A few more miles to go before I sleep.

?

(Selected Poems of Frost, p. 173)

? As far as the reading of this poem is concerned, in completing the reading of the text, the reader must consciously open up his personal schema to the theme of nature, absorbing the natural imagery contained in the original text, such as "woods," "snow," "dark", "horse", and "night", and consciously dig out the metaphors of these images, thus simulating the poet's unique experience in creating the poem. Upon first reading the poem, the reader will visualize a winter evening scene with the help of symbols provided by the text. It is serene and elegant. But the reading should not end here. As mentioned earlier, true reading must be done by entering into the deeper structure of the poem.

? In the process of interpreting the symbols of the text, the reader's brain must be involved in the process of assigning meaning to the symbols, entering into a state of deep comprehension, and raising the surface imagery of the symbols read to a higher schematic level, discovering "snow", "dark", and "snow". "snow", "dark" and "sleep" are essentially connected to our perception of death, and thus we understand that these symbols do not actually refer to the natural and physical phenomena they represent, but rather are metaphors for death. In the details of the poem, the reference to the master of the woods is essentially a metaphor for death, and the word "horse" is a metaphor for the poet's self-consciousness under the image of a horse -- in this case, the poet's self-consciousness. -- In this poem, the poet always rides on a horse, which is the driving force of his journey, and the poet will continue to ride the horse forward. Judging from this, the horse here is not a horse, but the will on which we constantly rely in our journey through life.

? In addition, the third quatrain of the poem makes extensive use of the /s/ sound, which is a metaphor for uneasiness and danger because, according to Western understanding, the /s/ sound is the sound of a snake, which is the embodiment of Satan, the devil.

The metaphors analyzed above are implicit in the text. On the basis of understanding the above metaphors, the reader can discover the theme of the poem if he or she digs further. The theme of the poem is that the poet's pause and reflection in the woods on a winter evening is a metaphor for the poet's temporary confusion (the darkest night of the year) and his inner doubts about whether he should stop for the temptations of the material world or continue to "search up and down" for his personal mission. The poet was not sure whether he should stop for the temptations of the material world or continue to "search up and down" for his personal mission. After a lot of thinking, the poet finally made a clear choice, that is, "before going to bed to drive a few more miles".