Bidirectionality in Donne's poetic metaphors

What is it about?

Through both a cognitive-literary and an empirical study of the metaphors in Donne’s poems “The Bait” and “The Flea,” we discuss the grotesque nature of his poetic imagery as constituting “a clash of incompatibles, generated by the great distance between the two semantic fields.” We argue that it is this clash that sustains bidirectionality in a metaphor, by preserving the tension between its two subjects, while allowing each to alternatively become the focus of one’s attention while reading.

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Why is it important?

Donne can be considered to be an early advocate of embodied cognition. His use of grotesque imagery not only juxtaposes the two semantic fields and their worlds but also impacts upon the bidirectionality of the process of metaphor comprehension.