Analysis Of Metaphors In The Poems Of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson became well-known all over the world after her death. Thanks to her sister, the rest of Dickinson’s poems were published in 1890. Mabel Loomis Todd edited contents of Dickinson’s poems. Among Emily Dickinson’s 1,775 poems, only twenty-four of them are titled. Twenty-one poems were sent to friends and three are for poems in the packets. Emily Dickinson wrote poems in her own style and she differed from others, so that her poems are unique and full of peculiarities. Additionally, she used various figures of speech. Among all Dickinson’s poems, the most common figure of speech is a metaphor. In poems metaphors are used in order to compare one thing with another in a hidden way. There are three major conceptual metaphors called: structural, orientational and ontological. According to Dr. Wyeth’s point of view, structural metaphor is a coherent process structure and is deduced certain phenomena in communicative utterance.
Orientational metaphors are identified by “upward” orientations, whereas “opposites” obtain a “downward” orientation. In 2007 the researcher Tran Van Co also stated about orientational metaphor: “We are the physical entity limited in a certain space and separated from the rest of the world by our skin; we perceive the rest of the world as the world outside us. Each of us is contained in limited space by the surface of the body, which is potentially orientational type of “inside-out”. This orientation makes us imagine other physical objects also limited by the surface. At the same time we also see them as containers with inner space and separated from the world outside”.
Another kind of metaphor is called ontological one and thanks to this metaphor, we can concentrate on various aspects of thinking.
Ontological metaphors are used for many purposes e. g. Identifying Aspects, Quantifying, Referring, Identifying Causes and Setting Goals and Motivating Actions. These kinds of metaphors were developed by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980; Monroe Beardsley has developed the most important approaches in order to understand metaphor. His classification is familiar and is divided into four parts such as the Comparison Theory, the Verbal-opposition Theory, the Iconic Signification Theory and the Emotive Theory. Beardsley developed his own version of the Verbal-opposition Theory.
In the In the book Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, Beardsley explained the feature of the theory in this way: “I said that when a term is combined with others in such a way that there would be a logical opposition between its central meaning and that of the other terms, there occurs that shift from central to marginal meaning which shows us the word is to be taken in a metaphorical way”. The Emotive theory is vigorous on emotional expressiveness. They are diverting in the meaningless way of saying something. In the Comparison Theory prepositions such as like or as are absent, because they make clear that it is a comparison between two things. Beardsley explained the Iconic Signification Theory providing the example “time is a river” because time and river are similar on the same directions, they go forward.
