A Comparative Analysis Of Poetic Metaphor In Chinese And English Poems

Metaphor is originally known as a concept of rhetoric. During the evolvement of metaphor studies, there are five major theories that occupy important positions: Comparison Theory, Substitution Theory, Interaction Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Blending Theory.Along with the studies of metaphor as a figure of thought, the concepts of poetic metaphor are put forward by Lakoff Johnson and Mark Turner (1989) in their More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. They take conceptual metaphor in daily life as the component of poetic metaphor. Conceptual metaphor penetrates into life and literary works as a way of thinking and a means of cognition. Poetry is the most complicated and novel expression of metaphor. People can understand miscellaneous and flowery poetic metaphor, in that"Poetic thought uses the mechanism of everyday thought, but extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary"(Lakoff and Turner 1989: 67). Poets endow poems many-leveled meanings and connotations with poetic metaphor; specify the abstract emotions; activize readers'thinking and imagination; and comprehend the deeper meanings of poems literally.Through literature reviews, the characteristics and operating mechanism for poetic metaphor producing are clarified in this thesis on the theoretical basis of conceptual metaphor theory, blending theory, and cognitive poetics. A comparative analysis of poetic metaphor is embodied by the comparisons of flower metaphor, which is chosen because the images of flowers abound in all kinds of poems and express the true feelings of human beings. The thesis mainly concerns the collection and contrast of flower metaphor between Chinese and English poems. Through analyses the thesis draws a conclusion that as the influence of different cultural factors, flower metaphor represents different connotations in Chinese and English poems.