Metaphor And Poem

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is one of the most famous masters in the Europeanand American history of literature in the20th century. In his whole life, he has written manygreat poems, of which The Waste Land is generally regarded as the milestone of modernpoetry and an epoch-making poem. With the main elements such as city, death, modernpeople, religion, force and so on, the poem depicts the phenomena of barren and spiritual-lesscivilization of the people living in the modern society: the term death becomes therepresentation of that era. People have lost the kind of pursuit and life that they should have,dead though alive. But with the baptism of religion, the thunder firing and flooding from God,people get a new life. In the poet’s opinion, religion is the right remedy to save the modernpeople. As for the poem, one of the prominent features or, in other words, the most importantwriting way is characterized by the metaphorical expressions.By means of Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) and Stockwell’s (2002) theories of poeticmetaphor, the conceptual metaphors in The Waste Land are studied and discussed in this thesis.From the perspective of conceptual metaphor, there are many image metaphors in the poem,of which,“the wasteland”,“woman”,“water and fire” are typical ones. They show us thevivid pictures of the lives and behaviors of people living in the waste land. From theperspective of the hierarchy of conceptual metaphors, the poetic metaphors in The Waste Landcan be divided into two kinds: one is megametaphor, the other is micrometaphor. The formeris the metaphor at a higher leve, such as THE REAL WORLD IS THE WASTELAND,LONDON IS AN UNREAL CITY, THE EUROPEAN IS THE FISHER KING, WATER IS GRAIL,LIFE IS A PLAY and so on. The latter is at a lower level and the subordinate of theformer, like SEASON IS A FORCE, OUTER FORCE IS A COURSE, LOCATION IS ACONTAINER and so on.From the metaphors in The Waste Land, it is found that the poetic metaphors in TheWaste Land are characterized by clarity, richness, systematicity, abstractness and scope. Theydemonstrate that the conceptual metaphorical mapping from the source domain to the targetdomain is characterized by cultural orientation, dynamism, creativeness, bidirectionality.The study of poetic metaphors in The Waste Land indicate that metaphors in a poemoften have the following features: poetic metaphor is closely related to the factors in thepoetry such as culture, historical background and so on. Metaphorical mapping in poetry willhighlight different characteristics when applied to different domains. The poetic metaphoricalmapping is dynamic. That is to say, the metaphorical mapping principle of the selectionbetween the source domain and target domain will be influenced by many factors such ascontext, history and culture background and so on. What’s more, for the sake of the structuralsystematicity and content coherence of the poem, the mapping of poetic metaphors willextend to a certain direction, which results in the extensibility or creativeness of a poeticmetaphor. Furthermore, in order to arouse readers’ deep thinking of poem, or to increase thenovelty of poetry, metaphorical mapping in the poetry will violate the conventionalized law ofone-way mapping from the source domain to the target domain but take the reverse way ofmapping from the target domain to the source domain. So the poetic metaphor is sometimestwo-way mapping. In other words, it is sometimes a bidirectional mapping.