Cognitive Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors in Contemporary Persian and English Poetry (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)

چکیده

This essay undertakes a comparative study of metaphorical imagination in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Sohrab Sepehri, not to flatten their poetics into a single cognitive frame but to ask how differently embodied minds, inflected by culture, geography, and cosmology, render abstraction sensuous. Refusing the tidy predictability often associated with conceptual metaphor theory, the study reworks its premises through the friction of image schema theory, affective cognition, and the irreducibility of cultural embodiment. Metaphors here are not ornaments or mere vehicles of thought: they are perceptual infrastructures, felt vectors, spiritual gestures. In Whitman, metaphor dilates space and amplifies energy, crafting a porous, vibrating body politic immersed in the democratic weather of the cosmos. In Sepehri, the metaphoric pulse slows, roots downward, dissolves into vegetal time and translucent perception, a mysticism attuned not to ascension but to erosion, to the grain of sand and the drop of water. Each poet’s figurative lexicon stages a different negotiation between self and world, body and spirit, opacity and clarity. Reading across these metaphorical archives, the study advances no universal theory but a comparative poetics of situated cognition, one attentive to how language thinks through the body, feels through the environment, and believes through its figures.