A Corpus-based Study on Conceptual Metaphor in T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets

School of Foreign Languages,Northeast Normal University,Changchun,China Email:1367582703@qq.com

[Abstract]This paper studies the distribution and the linguistic realization of conceptual metaphors in Four Quarters based on BNC.As shown in the poem,there exists a conspicuous distribution of conceptual metaphors,among which ontological metaphor is the most frequently employed.The reason behind it may lie in the unique nature of ontological metaphor,Eliot’s transformation towards religious theme and the particular subject of this poem,namely,the time.The research findings also suggest that key word analysis is a feasible approach for the study of poems that contain abundant conceptual metaphors.

[Keywords]conceptual metaphor;ontological metaphor;structural metaphor

Introduction

Four Quartetsis a masterpiece of T.S.Eliot’s late poetry,a new peak Eliot reached afterThe Waste Land.As the representative of late symbolism,Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948 forFour Quartets.The images,being target domains in the realm of conceptual metaphor and the focal point of symbolism,can not be discussed separately from metaphors.Therefore,this paper sheds lights on the distribution of conceptual metaphors inFour Quartets,analyzes the linguistic realization of them by identifying key words and their concordances and explains the potential reasons for the distribution based on the data collected.

Categories of Conceptual Metaphors

Conceptual metaphor theory was established by Lakoff and Johnson in the bookMetaphors We Live By,opening a new era for metaphor study.This theory holds that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life,and the nature of metaphor is to understand and experience one thing in terms of another(Lakoff & Johnson,1989,p.24).J.Richards claimed inPhilosophy of Rhetoricthat metaphor is a matter of mental processing,which is also widely used in human languages(Richards,1936,p.30).Conceptual metaphor is a process of systematic mapping from a source domain to a target domain and was classified into three kinds:orientational metaphors,ontological metaphors and structural metaphors.

Ontological metaphor,as an important category of the three,makes it possible to view abstract things that are hard to understand as concrete substance,and thus serves a certain purpose.It has become a kind of tool to represent mental phenomena omnipresent in the daily expressions.For example,in the sentence“He swallowed all the sadness”,sadness here is to be regarded as food that is edible to facilitate the depiction of emotions.

Structural metaphor is an internally consistent mapping system,and there are certain similarities between the characteristics of the two structures.One typical example would be ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IS WAR.

Figure 1 The ECNOMIC ACTIVITY IS WAR Mapping

Orientational metaphor is the kind of metaphor that entails spacial relationship,like UP and DOWN,FORWARD and BACK,IN and OUT.For example,in the following expressions“the way upward and the way downward are the same”and“the way up is the way down”,DOWN represents the way that is negative and degraded,and UP represents the way that is positive with the feature of vitality and vigor.

Data analysis

Two major tools were utilized in this research.One is Wordsmith,the other is AntConc 3.5.8.The function of“Key Words”in Wordsmith is to identify the salient words in the text and present its frequencies.The importance of the“key words”lies in its ability to find the images which were usually loaded with special meaning in poetry.Through the images,researchers can better understand the focal point and have interpretations from a different level(Chen,2006,p.29).

AntConc 3.5.8 is used to locate the key words and record their concordance so as to analyze the construction of conceptual metaphors through the concordance.

As can be seen from Table 1,ontological metaphor is most commonly used in this poem with the frequency being 77.51%,followed by structural metaphor and orientational metaphor.Table 2 summarizes the subcategory and its metaphorical expressions of ontological metaphor inFour Quartets.

Table 1 Numbers and frequency of conceptual metaphors in Four Quartets

Table 2 Ontological metaphor and its expressions in Four Quarters

sense is entity agony is entity stillness is place intensity is place time is space time is a container desolation is container cold the sense point to the agony move perpetually in its stillness we must be still and still moving into intensity the moment in and out of time and future time contained in time past;that is to place it in time empty desolation

Human metaphor

Among all the Ontological metaphors inFour Quartets,human metaphor constitutes a majority of the ontological metaphor,making it a significant part in this poem.By empowering objects with human behaviors,human metaphors present vivid caricature of objects.In this poem,typical target domains are nature related objects,namely,nature forces,plants,etc.Meanwhile,the nature objects serve as another critical role,that is,the images with symbolic meanings.The key wordtimewas also endowed with the qualities of man this poem.Time,a vital concept in the salvation theme of this poem,is the first key words in the list(except from all the function words)with each quartets centering around it.To elaborate the complex concept of time,various conceptual metaphors are employed,among which the human metaphor is a conspicuous one.Below is a figure processed by AntConc 3.5.7,which specifies the concordance with the key wordtime.

Figure 2 Key words in Four Quartets processed by Wordsmith

Figure 3 Concordance with the key word Time processed by AntConc 3.5.7

E1:Time is the preserver as well as the destroyer.

This two-side nature of time was emphasized for times.For the side of destroyer,time crushes everything and leaves nothing in the world,reminding human of what they choose to forget.For the preserver,time protects everything.The concordance also points to specific period of time namely future,after,before,past as shown in the graph.In this poem,time before and time after are seen as one,because future will soon arrive.Present is the point connecting past and future,torturing people(Gu,2001,p.55).

Another key word that appeared frequently with human metaphors is sea.It is also an important image inFour Quartets,symbolizing the infinite time.It showed up with the comparison of the river which represents limited time.Below is a figure purporting the concordance of sea processed by AntConc 3.5.7.

Figure 4 Concordance with the key word sea processed by AntConc 3.5.7

E2:Ended their voyage on the sand,in the sea's lips

E3:Or in the dark throat which will not reject them

According to the two examples,theseais personified,presenting a vast picture of deepness.It is relatively more objective and eternal compared to the river.The lips and throat are the body features that serve the purpose of casting deeper meanings to the power of sea,which adds vividness to expressions,leaving an impression of tolerance and eternalness.

Entity metaphor

Entity metaphor,abundant in this poem,is another paramount touch point of ontological metaphor.In this kind of metaphor,abstract things like emotions and experiences are taken as concrete entities.In the sentence:“And cold the sense and lost the motive of action”,the intangible and abstract sense is frozen as a substance.The concept love,especially holy love,is the theme of this religious poem,occupying a prominent place in the key word list.

E4:For liberation—not less of love but expanding of love beyond desire

Expand is a verb that collocates with tangible substance,andloveis the mental phenominon that can be measured in example 4,from which it can be inferred that entity metaphor is employed.

Container metaphor

Container metaphor is also commonly distributed inFour Quartets.In such metaphor,a kind of concept is metaphorically used as a container.For example,in the expression“And future time contained in time past”,the concepttimeis a container.In the expression“Through the dark cold and the empty desolation”,the conceptdesolationacts as a container with the quality of emptiness.

E6:A Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness

E7:In the stillness between the two waves

E8:In my beginning is my end.

Above are the examples of the expressions ofstillness.As an abstract concept,it is modified by empty and serves as a container here.Understanding the meaning ofstillnessis of fundamental importance to grasping the theme of this poem.It is the point of eternalness and harmony,an intersection.As can be seen from figure 1,stillnessoccupies an significant place in the keys words list.After identifying its concordance as the chart above,we could find several expressions with the company of the conceptual metaphors.For the example 8,time acts as a container,suggesting the circulation of life.The circulation of nature is a theory emphasized repeatedly inFour Quartets(Liu,2006,p.94-95).To accommodate to this fact of life,T.S.Eliot pointed a way,that is,to live with modesty.And it is by living with such modesty that one can redeem oneself.When personalizing time as man,Eliot considered it to be both destroyer and preserver.

Other metaphors

One characteristic of the orientatonal metaphor in this poem is that almost all of them are related to time,a focal point of the theme.Though not as frequently as another two conceptual metaphors appeared inFour Quartets,orientational metaphor is the fundamental tool to instill meaning into the concept of time,and in turn,the theme of this poem.Structural metaphors are much fewer than that of ontological metaphors.

E9:The waste sad time stretching before and after

E10:Twenty years largely wasted

E11:Of which the flame is roses

Generally speaking,the verb waste occurs in concordance with money.Therefore,to waste time is to consider time as money,denoting the quality of preciousness of time.By using this expression,Eliot rued the days squandered before,and he indicated that time past and time future is to be redeemed by utilizing time present.This poem depicts the unbearable sorrows caused by time so as to remind people to be pious towards it.Roseis the magnificent paradise in Eliot’s mind,and the rose garden was compared to the Garden of Eden.InFour Quartets,Eliot described the transformation of the four elements.Flame,being one of the four elements,is highly volatile.It is unification of destroy and rebirth(Deng,2017,p.6).By assuming the rose as frame,Eliot suggests that only through the trial of flame,the trial of annihilation,can one reach the happiness symbolized by roses.

Discussion

Conceptual metaphors are integral part of poems,as one can easily find expressions with conceptual metaphors in poems.According to the data,ontological metaphor was adopted most widely,with its frequency reaching 77.51%and its category varying the most.This is probably due to the unique nature of ontological metaphor,namely,the quality to allow abstract concepts possess characteristic of concrete things.It acts as a bridge connecting the images and readers,making it possible for Eliot to quantify the ideational phenomena and elaborate on it with wider range of ways of depiction.

Another particular reason is that Eliot’s writing style changed to be religiously centered in the year of 1927 when the general spiritual situation was blurred by the aftermath of war(Wang,2007,p.125).Poets at that age sought to conjure up ways to comfort both themselves and people to have beliefs amid the reconstruction.The religion was what Eliot had found at that time,which can be saliently reflected by poems likeAsh Wednesday,Marina(Jiang,1997,p.97).And the messages that poets wanted to deliver in religious poems of Eliot are about the sacred philosophy of self salvation though which he found that there could hardly be a feasible way to explain the morals and disciplines in the material world.The way to have oneself salvaged pointed out by Eliot is to hold the holy aspiration of being spiritually supported while experiencing agony,as shown in many of Eliot’s later poems.Therefore,he stepped onto the stage of spiritual baptism,which requires bountiful portrays to further extend the meaning so as to endow physical and tangible features to the target concepts.One way to achieve this is through the construction of ontological metaphor.

The subject ofFour Quartets,time,was in itself a conceptual definition,discussed across the whole poem with the philosophical thoughts like darkness and stillness built around it.The writer incessantly revealed how to consider time by regarding time as entities,containers,human,etc.Human metaphor is an indispensable part of the conceptual metaphors,for the lifeless existences were to serve as diversified powers and symbols of holiness.Creatures in nature were empowered as the message deliverer of god,warning people the tininess of their beings(Deng,2017,p.6).Therefore,human metaphors,which render these lifeless existence qualities of human,could ably accomplish the purpose of revealing the cruelness as well as the redeemable quality of time.

Conclusion

In theFour Quartets,with philosophical and religious thoughts being soul and flesh of the subject,conceptual metaphors play a paramount role in the construction of images.And the building of ontological metaphors is the central point due to the nature and theme of this poem.To discuss it in detail,the human metaphor is the most conspicuous one compared with other ontological metaphors.The penetration on conceptual metaphors and elaboration of key words are inseparable part of poem construction and paves the way for the holistic study on the poem itself.