Orient Research Journal of Social Sciences ISSN Print 2616-7085

December 2019, Vol.4, No. 2 [312-320] ISSN Online 2616-7093

Metaphors We Live By: A Critical and Corpus Based Analysis of 21st Century
Pakistani English Poetry

Muhammad Riaz Gohar1, Dr. Muhammad Afzal2 & Dr. Behzad Anwar 3

1. Ph. D Scholar, Department English University of Gujrat, Gujrat

2. HOD, Department of Urdu GC Women University Sialkot
3. HOD, Department English University of Gujrat, Gujrat

Abstract

This study focuses on the critical evaluation of the most frequent metaphors in the
Pakistani English poetry (PakEP) of 21st century. The poetic corpus includes the
works of the maximum number of the poets from the whole of the country (sixty in
number). They all belong to the post 9/11 time period. The corpus has thus two prime
concerns as recency and representativeness. The researcher sets three objectives;
first, which are the most frequent metaphors in the 21st C Pakistani English poetry;
second, what the particular mood do these metaphors exhibit; third, to which school
of poetry do these poets show their affiliation. With the use of AntConc3.2.1, the
frequency, the concordance and the collocation of the most frequent metaphors have
been discovered. Parallel to these, the description, interpretation and explanation of
the metaphors have been conducted with the help of Fairclough’s (2000) model. The
present study indicates that the recent English poetry of Pakistani young lot is
thematically overwhelmed by love, heart and life. Secondly, despair and frustration
are the moods of such poets in general. Thirdly, Pakistani English poetry is more
akin to classicism and romanticism than modernism.

Key Words: Metaphors, Pakistani English Poets, Corpus, Themes, Mood, School of
Poetry

Introduction

Pakistani English Poetry (PakEP) grew in Pakistan by a number of poets who

wrote in English. English is Pakistan’s official languages and its history goes back to
the British colonial period on the Sub-Continent. Anyhow, the national dialect that is
spoken in the country is known as Pakistani English (PakE). It makes an important
part of modern Pakistani literature written in English. Alamgir Hashmi (1978)
introduced the term “Pakistani Literature in English” and since that time the term has
been in vogue to indicate the poets of Pakistan who write in English language. Now it
is an academic discipline and an accepted area of study. The poet TaufiqRafat (1927
–1998) also passed the statement that a large number of Pakistani writers, in general,
prefer to write in English and same is the case with PakEP. Anyhow in the recent
years, with the growth of education and literary rate, the ratio of PakEP has grown
many times. Moreover, the youth which settles abroad is more prone to write poetry
in English. Though they write in English language, they have unmistaken imprints of
native culture on their verses. Such expatriate poets make Pakistani diasporas.

Besides, after the incident of 9/11, the identity issue of Pakistani nation got at
stake at global level and there came a sudden boom in writing poetry on the part of
youth. They seem raising voices for the identity retention at national and geographical
levels. Claire Chambers (2011) states, “Pakistani and other writers of Muslim
background draw upon, return to, and build on a canon of largely Muslim writing and
art from the subcontinent and Middle East”. But along with such daring colors, we
find, love, heart and life as general and the most frequent metaphors shadowed by
fear and despair perhaps because of the looming shadows of the proxy war of terror.
 Metaphors We Live By: A Critical and Corpus
Based Analysis of 21st Century Pakistani English Poetry

One more thing that can be observed is that they,Corpus Based Analysis of Pakistani
English Poetry consciously or unconsciously, shows their affiliation to Classicism
and Romanticism more than any other school. The affiliation to these schools may
also be justified by the historical phenomenon as PakEP is still at the level of
metamorphosis.

In addition to the published works of Alamgir Hashmi, Taufiq Riffat, Zulifqar

Ghose, Moniza Alvi, KamilaShamsie, we have so many young poets who posted their
poems online such as Raja Abbass, Hamza Abid, Irum Afzal, Ijaz Ahmad, Madiha
Ahmad, Muhammad Ahmad, Myra Ahmad and so on. The present study focuses on
such lot of Pakistani English Poets whose works are unpublished but they are
available online. The researcher collected such works in the form of a corpus so that
the dominant themes and moods of such young unpublished poets may be captured
and investigated critically.

Specialized poetic corpus has been generated because there was no publicly
available corpus of PakE poetry for the purpose of research.For this purpose a long
time has been taken to collect data from all the regions of Pakistan with the help of
libraries, internet archives and personal effortshowever it found to be an interesting
job to meet different thematic and metrical experiments in PakEP. The 60 poets (all
belonging to post 9/11 time period) were taken and their works were collected in the
form of a single file. It was saved in Plain Text format to make a corpus. The
AntConc 3.2.1 software was employed to handle and manipulate the data. The list of
the sixty poets is as attached as Appendix-A.

Literature Review

Yob (2003) describes that metaphor is a powerful mental instrument which

can be used by the individuals for understanding and explaining a high level abstract,
complex or theoretical phenomenon. In this way the metaphors help us to understand
the difficult concepts and terms more clearly. They make the abstractions concrete
and visible.

The metaphors exercise power on individuals. They help in starting a

cognitive process in the mind of the reader. Individuals define their or the others’
feelings, experiences and ideas through metaphors. In this way metaphors help
individuals recognize the world and the things around them.

St. Clair (2002) argues that metaphors define different cultures. Each culture
has its own particular set of metaphors which may help the readers (from some alien
culture) understand history, norms, rituals and ceremonies of that particular culture.
These metaphors act as semiotic symbols for that culture. Levi Strauss (1995) studies
the primitive cultures and takes natural objects metaphors. Those metaphors used to
the myths and icons for them and their lives used to be influenced by them. St. Clair
(2002) again states that the cultural metaphors in Indo-European English Literature
are the part and parcel of that language. Metaphors represent how people think in that
language. The reason for this deep connection between metaphor and thought has to
do and act in some particular area or culture. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) opine that
metaphors are used to develop linguistic categories. Fauconnier and Turner (2002)
give new direction to cognitive linguistics by demonstrating how conceptual blending
takes place in metaphorical thought. For example, in the metaphor

“The tree is breath of life,” the idea is that trees are the source of oxygen which is
ultimately sign of life.

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Gibbs (1994) explains the role of metaphors in the poetic language by

claiming that the metaphors provide figurative sense to the literal language. Many
literal terms become figurative as they are loaded with additional meanings. These
additional meanings may be historical, cultural, political, religious or
autobiographical. It intends to create a strong statement that no literal text can
accomplish. He further differentiates Metaphor from idioms by saying that we can
understand a metaphor even with no prior knowledge but for an idiom it is vice versa.

According to Ritchie D. (2004), a literary metaphor functions to find out

local as well as broader contexts simultaneously. The broader context is cultural one.
In this way, a metaphor functions in two directions. The literary metaphor, in this
way, is generally thought to be more stylistically colorful. In poetry the most common
and literal expressions can be strongly metaphorical by means of the symbolic color
of one word or even entire poem. Thus a metaphor refers an implicit concept to a
verse or to a poem.

McIntyre, D. and Walker, B., (2010) made metaphorical analysis of William

Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’. They separated the metaphors of
innocence and hostility. They used the software Wmatrix and carried out the
computer-based analysis of the songs. They created automatic semantic annotation
through Wmatrix.

A far as the mood of a poem is concerned, it is the atmosphere that the poet
creates in the poem. In poetry and other literary works, the mood is the prevailing
impression or emotional atmosphere evoked by the text. W. Harmon and H. Holman
(1996) suggest that mood is “the emotional-intellectual attitude of the author toward
the subject”.

Through the metaphorical expressions we can trace out thematic nuances and
mood of the poets. We may also find the literary affiliation of the poets through the
diagnosis of the technical and thematic traits. A specialized corpus of poetry can be
used to find out all the literary, thematic and historical constructs of the poets.

Method, Theory and Data

Research Method

This is a quantitative cum qualitative study. Data has been collected in the
form of corpus. The most frequent words/ metaphors which are love, heart and
lifehave been traced out to carry out this study. These metaphors are analyzed further
through concordance and collocation. The frequency, the concordance and the
collocation have been put parallel to Fairclough’s (2000) stages of CDA such as
description, interpretation and explanation.

Fairclough’s Framework

Fairclough (2000) presents three-dimensional framework for studying

discourse. These three interrelated levels of analysis are referred as the physical text,
the discursive practices related to the production, distribution and consumption of
text, and thirdly the social practice, which explains how the data in the text are used
within social environments.

For Fairclough, Text is only a section of the social process, because there are
three elements for discourse, namely text, interaction, and social context. In addition

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 Metaphors We Live By: A Critical and Corpus
Based Analysis of 21st Century Pakistani English Poetry

to text itself, the process of social interaction involves the process of text production
and text interpretation. Hence, text analysis is a part of discourse analysis.

The following Figure may help to understand the three levels and the
relationship among them as;

Corpus Based Analysis of Pakistani English Poetry

Figure 1Fairclough (2000): Three Dimensions for CDA

In this way these three levels may be named as description, interpretation and
explanation where

1. Description is the stage which deals with formal properties of the text or the
text in itself.
2. Interpretation deals with the relationship between text and the process of
production of the text.
3. Explanation sets the relationship between text and social context, with the
social factors that determine the role of text in socio-cultural environments.

All these stages are concerned with analysis, but the nature and level of it is
different in each stage. Analysis in the first stage describes the formal properties of
the text and regards text as an object. Here the frequency of the particular metaphors
has been discovered through the corpus. The second phase is related to the analysis
of the co-text of the given text. The collocation patterns of the particular metaphors
are pointed out. Finally in the third stage, the aim is to explain the context of the
metaphors to explain how the relationship exists between social events and the
construction of the particular metaphors.

Data Discussion

Description

List of the most frequent Metaphors in the Corpus of PakE poets of 21st c

Rank Freq Word

23 712 Love
32 570 Life

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45 432 Heart

Normalization of Data. Only the first twenty concordance lines of each

metaphor and its File View option have been focused for sampling.

Interpretation

Love

Love is a sweet song, love is a holy passion, love has spiritual shades,
love is a sweet touch, love is cheap, love is to be worshipped, love is a new brand,
love is a weak point, love is spring, love is colorful, love is pain, love is life, etc.

So we can see that the metaphor of love presents two moods as;

Optimistic mood Pessimistic mood

A sweet song, love is cheap
a holy passion, a weak point
has spiritual shades, love is pain,
a sweet touch,
to be worshipped,
a new brand,
is spring,
is colorful,
is life

Numerically we can say that,

Total metaphors=12

Related to optimism=09 (75%)

Related to pessimism=09 (25%)

Life

Life is beautiful, life is like a rabbit, life is like a cat’s mew, life is like
scattered cards, life is failure, life is failure, life is in flowers, life is in ashes, life is in
sorrows, life is in the success, life is like a day, life falls apart, life is path to death,
life is short, life is a pain, life is a flow, life’s last chapter is like a bulky novel.

Optimistic mood Pessimistic mood

Life is beautiful, life is failure,
life is like a rabbit, life is failure
life is like a cat’s mew, life is in ashes,
life is like scattered cards, life is in sorrows,
life is in flowers, life falls apart
life is in the success, life is path to death,
life is like a day, life is short, life is a pain
life is a flow, life’s last chapter is like a bulky novel

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Numerically we can say that,

Total metaphors=16

Related to optimism=08 (50%)

Related to pessimism=08 (50%)

Heart

Heart causes a blast, heart is to fall down, heart is under the burden, heart is
cruel, heart is like a rhyme, heart gives courage, heart is shattered, heart is to split,
heart is bleeding, heart is brave, heart gleams like torch, heart is brown/ugly, heart
gives light, heart is light, heart has gone to the beloved, etc.

Optimistic mood Pessimistic mood

heart is like a rhyme, Heart causes a blast,
heart gives courage, heart is to fall down,
heart is brave, heart is under the burden
heart gleams like torch, heart is cruel,
heart gives light, heart is shattered,
heart is light, heart is to split
heart has gone to the beloved, heart is bleeding,
heart is brown/ugly,

Numerically we can say that,

Total metaphors=15

Related to optimism=07 (47%)

Related to pessimism=08 (53%)

Explanation: The metaphors under discussion that are;love, life, heart, show that the
PakE poets manifest the themes of romance, philosophy of life and the mysteries of
heart as the most prominent ones.

The highest frequency of love and its concordance (KWIC) shows that these
poets are overwhelmed by romantic colors and for them love is the spice of life. It
means there is nostalgia or imagination regarding love. Though the years during
which such poets wrote, was the age of fear and terror and especially there were the
looming shadows of war on the horizon. The political scenario was also in doldrums.
So we see a sense of escapism from the socio-political realities on the part of the
young lot of PakE poets.

The idea of a fruitful love shows their affiliation with the Romantic school of
Poetry which remained in vogue in England during the first half of the 19th c.
Romanticism was there as a by-product of the French Revolution. Here in Pakistan,
we find the same sort of escapism and idealism in the first two decades of the 21st
century.

Numerically talking, we find that the 75% of the selected data are related to
the mood of optimism while just 25% are related to pessimism (as shown through
Fig.1). This ration indicates that the PakE poets are quite hopeful for the fulfillment
of their love. This thing again alludes to romantic fervor on the part of our youth. On

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the contrary we find Pakistani Urdu poetry a step forward as Faruqi, S.R. (1992)
states,
“The Progressives have provided the valuable service of keeping Urdu
writers sensitive to their socio-political environment and its injustices. ... [T]hey
shifted the centre of literary experience from afaq (the universe in the abstract) to
anfus (people and things). In the Islamic and Indo-Muslim traditions, the stress was
on afaq. That is why our classical literature has so little nature poetry of the
‘concrete’ type, and our traditional narrative so little ‘characterization’.”

But our English poets are still spellbound by the glamour of romance and
love. They still seem entangled inafaq(the universe in the abstract). They prefer to
stay away from anfuswhich is the hallmark of realism and modernism.

As far as the metaphor of life is concerned, we again find the dominance of

afaq(the universe in the abstract) as compared to anfus(people and things) as life is a
conceptual metaphor/ noun. Here the frequency is almost same in both the moods;
optimism and pessimism (as shown in Fig.2) which shows that the poets are lingering
somewhere between hope and despair. They are uncertain about life being as a
blessing or a bane.

We find the treatment of life sometimes like the Classics-life as predestined

(life is path to death, life is short, life is a pain); sometimes we find life like the
Romantics-life to be enjoyed as we wish (Life is beautiful, life is in flowers);and even
sometimes life like the Moderns- life influenced by the sociopolitical norms (life is a
flow, life is like scattered card). Moniza Shamsie (2007) aptly comments, “The
universal nature of Islamic philosophy has meant that many Pakistani English writers
have perceived themselves in international terms, yet identified with Pakistan... They
are linked to trends in Anglo-American literature too, and that of Commonwealth
countries where English was acquired due to the colonial encounter. So you have a
body of work, created by a myriad of influences. Perhaps that cultural synthesis, the
blurring of definition, is identity.” In this way these poets don’t seem to show their
affiliation to some particular school of thought regarding their treatment of life; they
rather mix all the major trends and hence cannot be defined in a single term in this
connection.

The metaphor of heart may be, at the same time, a physical referent as well
as an abstraction/concept. But in the poetic domain heart is more an idea than a
physical organ. It shows that the abstractness or afaq is again prominent in PakE
poetry.

If we talk about the mood related to the metaphor of heart, we see that
pessimism is somewhat greater than optimism (as we see in Fig.3). Heart is in
heavens but a little one and it is dejected most of the time as (heart is shattered, heart
is to split, heart is bleeding). In line with this following extract from Wyatt’s (1503-
1542) poem ‘My heart I gave thee’, can be considered,

My heart I gave thee, not to do it pain;

But to preserve, it was to thee taken.
I served thee, not to be forsaken,
But that I should be rewarded again.
I was content thy servant to remain
But not to be paid under this fashion

In this extract we find heart, if in any way dejected, is because of the

indifference of the beloved. Such type of cynical moods are very typical in Petrarch

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(Italian Poet of Medieval ages) and in Wyatt and Surrey (Elizabethean age). In this
way Pak E poets show their thematic affiliations to Italian and Elizabethean traditions
regarding the treatment of heart as a metaphor.

Conclusion

“Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: “It is a
great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing
by far is to be a master of metaphor” (Poetics 1459a); “ordinary words convey only
what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something
fresh” (Rhetoric 1410b).”

George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

In a social setting, poetry being an expression of thought is always appeared

to be influenced by prevalent socio-cultural, socio-political, socio-economic and
socio-historical factors. 21st century Pakistani poetry in English especially in the
aftermath of nine-elevenism has been found to portray interesting system of
conceptual metaphors. The most frequent metaphors used by the young lot of
Pakistani English poets have been considered for the corpus based critical analysis.
Specialized poetic corpus has been generated to gather quantitative data (frequently
occurring metaphors). Afterwards, quantitative data (the most frequent metaphors)
have been analyzed using corpus tools mainly; concordance and collocation. The
results have been put parallel to Fairclough’s (2000) three stages of CDA
interconnected with three levels of process for qualitative evaluation. This helped
identify the most frequent metaphors used in 21st C. PakEP in post nine-elevenism
context. In addition, the present study also facilitated to unveil the specific mood of
Pakistani English poets along with their inclination towards particular school of
poetry.

Findings

The overall discussion reveals the following facts;

1. The PakE poets of the 21st C. have the metaphors of love, life and heart as the
most frequent ones.
2. All these metaphors are conceptual in nature showing their trend more towards
abstractions than towards objects and persons. In other words they are more
inclined towards rationalism than empiricism; living more in the world of
idealism than in the world of reality.
3. Their treatment of the abstract metaphors as the most frequent ones and then the
thematic contents attached to these metaphors help to find out that these poets are
more akin to classical and romantic schools than modern or postmodern one.
Though it was the age of despair and terror (post 9/11), yet they do not seem to be
influenced by their socio-political surroundings. They seem to be away from their
age and from the main current of the era. They are more prone to be idealists than
realists.

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