A Comparative Study Of The Plant Images In Qu Yuan's "Nine Songs" And Keats's "Six Odes"

Qu Yuan is an aristocrat of the Chu State in the late Warring States Period.He is a pioneer of Romantic poetry in the history of ancient Chinese literature.His poems are magnificent and elegant,and his imagination is fertile and peculiar.Qu Yuan is good at expressing his rich emotional world with the help of various plant images.John Keats is an outstanding Romantic poet in the history of English literature.He has made significant contributions to English Romantic poetry.He is good at combining emotion with nature in his poetry,looking for creative inspiration from ordinary life and natural scenery,and creating an immersive experience for readers.Although his life was short,he left a valuable treasure in poetry creation.So far,although some Chinese and Western researchers have studied the plant images used by the two poets,few researchers have made comparative study of their representative poems “Six Odes” and “Nine Songs”.The comparative study of plant images in their poems from the perspective of comparative literature is a new theoretical attempt.It helps to reveal the richness of the plant images in their poems.At the same time,it can also inspire contemporary poetry creation.Therefore,the author of this dissertation will use parallel research,in comparative literature and cognitive metaphor in linguistics to analyze the plant images in the two groups of poems from the perspective of human sense,in an attempt to find out the similarities and differences.By exploring the use of imagery in these two groups of poems,the author of this dissertation find that the two poets have different choices of plant images in their respective poems.Keats prefers to describe plant images from vision,like the colors or shapes of the plant,while,in Qu Yuan's “Nine Songs”,there are more olfactory and gustatory plant images.Qu Yuan mainly expresses the lofty moral cultivation,the respect for various gods in the process of offering sacrifices,love and affection between lovers and his patriotic feelings.Through a comparative analysis of plant images in Keats and Qu Yuan's poems,this dissertation draws the following conclusions: as the representative figures of Chinese and British Romantic literature,both Keats and Qu Yuan use the plant images and bountiful imagination to express their inner feelings.This reflects that human's common cognition,namely cognitive metaphor,originates from human life experience.They all hope to escape from the suffering and dark society,yearning for the fairyland-like mythological world and the purely natural world;in terms of poetry creation,they are not constrained by the old customs and open up new forms of poetic expression.However,due to the influence of Eastern and Western thinking habits and aesthetic views,as well as the differences in personal experience,social economy and natural environment,the two poets also present heterogeneous features.