Conceptual Metaphor of Eliot’s Waste Land Versus Al-Sayyab’s Rain Song

Abstract

Of the rhetorical tools, metaphor still has insufficient interest, primarily as a crosscultural
 phenomenon though it is an attractive and vivid area, so it should be studied
 and highlighted (Suhadi, 2018) and (Barton, 2017). This comparative study investigated
 the conceptual metaphor in modern Arabic versus English poetry with reference to
 Al-Sayyab and T. S. Eliot as two poles of modern poetry in Arabic and English. This
 study tried to shed light on the frequency of the conceptual metaphors in Al-Sayyab’s
 The Rain Song versus Eliot’s The Waste Land. Besides, it aimed to explore the
 similarities and differences between the two poems in using the CMT orientational ’Up’
 and ’Down’ strategy. However, to accomplish its aims, this study adopted Lakoff and
 Jonson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory ’CMT’ (1980); this theory asserted that metaphor
 is an inborn mental system in which we understand a certain concept in terms of
 another by drawing a logical mapping between the source domain and the target one.
 Finally, the study found that modern poetry was wealthy of conceptual metaphors. It
 also discovered that The Rain Song involved 65.29% conceptual metaphors of its total
 lines, so it exceeded The Waste Land which comprised only 39.40%. Furthermore, the
 study revealed that the two poems were generally pessimistic in which the ’Down’
 domain exceeded the ’Up’ one in each poem. Also, it detected that Eliot was more
 pessimistic than Al Sayyab who was more optimistic.