DEATH IS LIFE: A Cognitive Analysis Of Sohrab Sepehri's "Water's Footsteps"

Abstract

<strong>Abstract</strong><br /> Sohrab Sepehri's poetry is a rich source of novel metaphors. As a poet deeply preoccupied with convincing us to see things differently, Sepehri redefines such key concepts as life and death in his poems. To give us a new understanding of these concepts, he creates numerous metaphors. Probing into his metaphors through a Cognitive Poetic approach helps find out how he constructs them. Cognitive Poetics is a new literary discipline which, among other things, tries to find the relationship between literary works and everyday language. This paper aims to disclose the underlying cognitive structure of Sepehri's metaphors of life and death in his "Water's Footsteps." Such an analysis reveals how the poet rejects the common way of comprehending the concepts of life and death to give them new meanings. The authors argue that the poet resorts to a kind of cognitive defamiliarization by refusing to employ the common Conceptual Metaphors for death and life. Instead, he constructs the metaphor of DEATH IS LIFE. Also discussed is wherein the poem the poet comes round to the common conceptual metaphors of death.<br /> <strong> </strong><br /> <strong>Keywords</strong>: Sohrab Sepehri, Conceptual Metaphor, cognitive poetics, death, life