The Conceptual Metaphor of Love as Journey and Path in Safi’s Poetry

Abstract

The concept of ‘Love’ is a widely employed concept in Safi’s Poetry collection. As a mystic poet owning a mystic cognitive intellect, Safi has attempted to define love from a mystic intellectual perspective. However, since the concept of love is an abstract concept with no physical manifestations, so the poet has not been able to introduce love only within the framework of its concept, but rather, he has tried to introduce it through other physical, concrete and well-known concepts known as Conceptual Metaphor. In fact, the concepts of “Journey” and “Path” are two concepts utilized by the poet as source domains to introduce target concept. Thus, the current study adopts “Conceptual Metaphor Theory”, a novel theory which has been proposed by George Lakoff and Martin Johnson in (1980). This theory approaches metaphor from a new perspective in which the core of conceptual metaphor is the identification of the target concept through the source concept. It attempts to focus on both metaphors ‘Love is a journey’ and ‘love is a path’ in Safi’s poetry with sufficient examples taken from his poetry collection. Further, it aims at drawing mapping between the target domain and source domain, so that an appropriate understanding about Safi’s poetry will be achieved.