A Study Of Natural Images In Shelley's Poems From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Image is the essence and soul of poetry.It is not only the expression of the poet's subjective emotions,but also the deep thinking of the poet about life.Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most famous English romantic poets,whose poems have beautiful rhythm and novel style.He is good at combining a variety of vivid natural images with the social status to express his profound implications.Conceptual Integration Theory is a new language understanding mechanism.It can spatialize human's thoughts and integrate contextual knowledge and background knowledge in a larger scope to produce richer meanings than original language in the process of information integration and reorganization.This thesis selects 198 poems of Shelley as corpus and combines with the actual characteristics of these poems,the author firstly classifies and summarizes the main natural images in the poet's poems,and then uses qualitative method to explore the basic emotional connotation of each natural image.Lastly,within the framework of CIT,five typical natural images are chosen with charts to reveal how natural images in Shelley's poems construct and show the real intention of the poet to endow the natural images.Based on the study,this thesis draws the following conclusions:Firstly,Shelley's poems are rich in natural images,but these natural images are not the poet's random combination,but the active choice and collocation.Thus,it is concluded that the main natural images in Shelley's poems are Moon image,Ocean image,Wind image,Flower image and Bird image.Secondly,through the emotional exploration of the main natural images,it can be found that the moon image implies sad or beautiful things;the ocean image mainly symbolizes the changeable and unpredictable things;the wind image mainly represents the powerful revolutionary forces;the flower image usually implies the sweet love relationship;the bird image indicates freedom,light and victory.Thirdly,based on CIT and the emotional connotation of the above-mentioned each of natural images,this thesis draws the conclusion that the meanings of the five kinds of natural images are constructed in the single-scope network,and they have different new meanings,namely,real intention of the poet's creation.Through in-depth study,this thesis finds that in the process of conceptual integration of each natural image,the production of new meanings must experience the metaphorical mapping between poetic images,the filling of readers' understanding to background of a poem and the compression of mental spaces by virtue of some logical relations,such as cause-effect,time and space,identity and whole-part etc.Finally,the result of the interpretation is that the real intention of the poet's creating natural images is to express his desire for companions,freedom and revolution through the moon image;the ocean image indicates that time means pains and destruction,and no one can defeat it;the wind image reveals the poet's optimistic attitude towards the victory of revolution;the flower image reflects the poet's sigh of short life and rough fate;and bird image implies that the poet actively pursues the ideal of absolute freedom.In general,concept integration theory is feasible for the interpretation of natural images in Shelley's poems,which helps readers understand the cognitive theory and expands the application breadth of this theory.In addition,this study enriches dimension of studies of Shelley's poems and broadens the path of poetry research and study.