Topological Approach To Visual Metaphor In Mary Oliver’s Poetry

As a renowned contemporary American writer, Mary Oliver (1935-) is a lover of naturewhich she puts in the center of her poetry. Being a sensitive, insightful and talented poet, sheinstills exquisite thoughts into her writing by means of creative application of language. Shetries to make herself invisible behind the lines to show the real power of poetical words. Sheonce said that the more we learn about the writers, the more damage we shall bring to theirworks. Therefore, it is of great necessity to return to the language itself for analysis, to makean in-depth study of Mary Oliver’s poetry from the perspective of linguistics, which will helpreinforce our basic comprehension of language itself. Since metaphor is always anindispensable component to poetry, we can gain a better understanding of poems by studyingmetaphor.Topological approach to visual metaphor is a new way to deal with metaphor, whichhas been initially put forward in the paper Topological Approach to Visual Metaphor byProfessor Xu Shenghuan, a renowned scholar and leading figure in linguistics home andabroad. In terms of visual metaphor, both tenor and vehicle can be perceived by ocular organs,while topological nature refers to the feature of invariance over continuous transformationamong spatial objects. Topological nature of visual metaphor resides in the homomorphismand universal between tenor and vehicle or between target and source, seen in the invarianceover transformation from tenor to vehicle or from target to source.This thesis opens with a brief introduction to Mary Oliver, a literary review on her poetryand the significance of our study. The main body of the thesis contains three chaptersfollowed by our conclusion.Chapter One is intended to discuss the theory of topological nature of visual metaphor. How is visual metaphor defined, and what are its topological properties will be specificallyillustrated.Chapter Two looks further into the characteristics of Mary Oliver’s poetry, centring onthe instances of visual metaphor in her poems. Oliver is well known for writing about natureand she presents the reader plenty of nature images by employing visual metaphor. It isevident that visual metaphor makes a great contribution to the accomplishments of her poetrycareer.Chapter Three, the most important part of the thesis, makes a specific analysis of chieflytwo poems by Mary Oliver from the perspective of topology. Both poems are about “snake”,an image which appears in Oliver’s writing rather frequently. Through the analysis of visualmetaphor from the topological perspective, the image of snake appears unique before oureyes.In conclusion, the author of this paper wishes to usher her readers into a luminoustranquil world glowing with wisdom and intelligence through studying visual metaphor inMary Oliver’s poems from the topological approach. Living in a world of fast speed, we needto slow down and take our time to do reflections. Mary Oliver’s poetry provides us anotherway to ponder over how we live and how we can live better. Topological approach to visualmetaphor in Mary Oliver’s poetry is not the end but a method, a process, through which toheighten the mind for a better future, a poetic living of life.