Metaphor In Frost's Poetry

Robert Frost is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His poetry can enjoy a crystal-ball like transparency and a sea-like fundamentality at the same time. This genius coherence is mainly achieved by his usage of metaphors. Started from the changes of the meaning of"metaphor", this thesis tries to explain Frost's comment—"'Metaphor'is the whole of poetry…Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing"—from the perception of Lakoff's conceptual metaphor. It also collects and analyzes Frost's similes and metaphors on"metaphor", such as a napkin going into a napkin ring and a current carrying the eel grass with it. Those images have both fixed ends and radiating ends, and that is absolutely the characteristic of Frost's play of metaphor—the coexistence of definiteness and flexibility in the poems. It is metaphor that greatly enriches the meanings of the poems.The second chapter focuses on the relation between metaphor and text, sounds and sentence structure. In Frost's poems, there are metaphors IN the text, but the more are metaphors EQUAL the text (parables). The vague target domains of those parables create abundant meanings of the poems. In addition, Frost's technique in using sounds and sentence structures sometimes makes them as a kind of"metaphor". The third chapter analyzes three recurring images in Frost's metaphors: transformation in the Nature symbolized by the change of water and seasons, woods and architectures. They touch upon the poet's two favorite themes: the independence of the Nature and the complexity of the relation between people and"I". They are two important bases for our study of the orientation of his metaphor.