METAPHOR MAKING MEANING - DICKINSONS CONCEPTUAL UNIVERSE

If meaning, understanding, and reasoning in human language are achieve d through bodily experience and figurative processes, as recent work i n cognitive linguistics has argued, then the traditional notion of a s eparation in kind between ordinary discourse and poetic language no lo nger holds. Metaphor making, under this view, is not peripheral but ce ntral to our reasoning processes, not unique to poetical thinking but that which is shared by both ordinary discourse and the language of po etry. Poets, then, in their metaphor making, serve as arbiters of and commentators on the way humans understand and interpret their world. M uch of Dickinson's poetry is structured by the extent to which she rej ected the dominant metaphor of her religious environment, that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME, and replaced it with a metaphor more in ac cordance with the latest scientific discoveries of her day, that of LI FE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. Examples from her poems show how the schemas of PATH and CYCLE and the AIR IS SEA image metaphor contribute to a co herent and consistent patterning that at the same time reflects a phys ically embodied world and creates Dickinson's conceptual universe.