A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors In Yeats’ The Tower

Yeats, a famous poet and playwright, one of the four Nobel Prize for literature winners, is noted for his gorgeous and allusive language in poetry composing. His poetry marks the transition from traditional to modern English poetry, and from romanticism to modernism in style. Yeats’ early works, including The Celtic Twilight and The Wind Among the Reeds, are mainly inspired by Irish myths and legends. Then, nationalist campaigns and ideas of Ezra Pond and William Blake nurtured Yeats’ hatred for capitalism and longing for rusticity. In his later years,Yeats developed more personalized style of writing with themes on families, life and the passing of time. The Tower, taken from his masterpieces in his later years, reflects his lament for time and life, and describes human frailty at the face of death.This thesis, based on Lakoff s Metaphor Theory, divides metaphors in The Tower into structural, ontological and orientational metaphors, and explains the cognitive stylistic features realized by those metaphors. Conclusions of this study can be drawn as follows:(1) In Yeats’ romantic poem The Tower, ontological metaphor is the most prominent type of metaphor. (2) Metaphors in The Tower are mainly about life and time, examples are CHILDHOOD IS A CONTAINER, MAN IS A DOG, OLD AGE IS AN ENEMY, and DEATH IS SLEEP, etc. (3) Stylistic features realized by metaphors in The Tower are foregrounding, ambiguity and coherence. Foregrounded features include parallelism and deviance, and ambiguity can mainly be explained by polysemy and Irish culture. As for coherence, it is the coherence within individual metaphors and coherence of different metaphors that integrate conceptual metaphors with the theme of the whole poem. The present thesis studies on the cognitive stylistic features of conceptual metaphors in Yeats’ The Tower, and it proves that conceptual metaphors are of great explanatory power. The author hopes that this study might be of some help for analyzing poems other than The Tower, and works of different styles.