ABSTRACT
Cognitive semantics is vitally concerned with poetry, because poetry is a vital dimension in human cognition and meaning production. Metaphor is still a central aspect of this concern, since the metaphorical phenomenon emphasizes what Jakobson called the 'poetic function' in language, its self-referential capacity, which is of course a characteristic of poetry but occurs at every moment in all genres of discourse. The analytic reading of the metaphorical structure of a text is thus, according to George Lakoff and Mark Turner, a prerequisite to its literary interpretation proper. Conceptual metaphor is a technical notion, suggesting that the content of an occurring metaphoric expression follows from a predicative conceptualization of the form: A (target) is B (source), and that the grammatical manifestation of the occurring metaphor is variable, whereas the underlying predicative structure is constant. The parallelism between the quatrains is underscored by the repetition of the phrase in the author, and the conceptual architecture of the following constructions is parallel.
