The metaphors in William Wordsworth’s poems based on Riffaterre’s Semiotic theory

ABSTRACT

Poetry is an art or work of poet. The mixture of experience, poet’s feeling, emotion, and thought are needed in order to create a successful work. The language of poetry is different from common language usage. However, it must have an esthetic value. The poetic element of poetry comes from figurative language aspects. It is caused the figurative language is more effective to explore what literary people mean. Metaphor is one type of figurative languages that presupposing a similarity of two or more things denotes one of them by terms literally signifying to other. Therefore, the researcher interested in studying the metaphors through semiotic theory. The problem statements that will be answered by this research are about the kinds of metaphorical expression and the meaning of metaphorical expression found in William Wordsworth’s poems dealing with the lower class societies.

This research focuses on the metaphors that found in five of Wordsworth’s poems dealing with the lower class societies. They are the Solitary Reaper, to A Highland Girl, the Stepping Westward, The Reverie of poor Susan, and A complaint.

Then, the research design of this research uses literary criticism. The data source of this research is taken from five poems of William Wordsworth dealing with the lower class societies. In addition, the researcher finds any relevant data to enrich the knowledge about the object. Beside that, the data analysis is started by reading and understanding the text of the poems based on heuristic reading, in order to find the metaphors in the poems. In the second, the hermeneutics reading is needed to understand the meaning of metaphor. The last step is inter text interpretation. It helps the researcher to understand the works deeply. After findings and discussion are summarized and finished by making conclusion.

According to the research, the researcher finds three kinds of metaphorical expression in the poems; (1) nominative metaphor, (2) predicative metaphor, and (3) sentential metaphor. Those are included into each poem in different number of result. As the result, the predicative metaphor is the dominant kind of metaphor that is found in the poems. In understanding the meaning of the poems, they (the poems) deal with the hierarchy human space perception; being, cosmos, energy, substantial, terrestrial, object, living, animate, and human. The result in this case is dominated by the “object” as one kind of the hierarchy human space perceptions.