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A Comparative Study of the Generative Mechanisms of Gui and Laurel as Mythic Metaphors in Classical Chinese and English Poetry

Author(s)

Yuanche Qiu

Affiliation(s)

Wusheng Institution, Liaoning University, Liaoyang, Liaoning, China

Abstract

Once gui and laurel enter poetry, they cease to be mere botanical referents. Their comparability lies less in botany than in a shared movement from natural object to mythically charged poetic sign. This article therefore asks not what the two images mean in the abstract, but how those meanings are produced, transmitted, and stabilized in different traditions. In English poetry, laurel develops along a relatively focused line from the myth of Daphne to the laurel crown and then to poetic self-fashioning. In Chinese poetry, gui grows through the overlapping of moon-palace myth, the trope of breaking the cassia branch, and later lyric practice. Read in this way, the contrast is not merely between one symbol and another, but between two different processes by which poetic images are culturally formed. The argument helps shift Sino-English comparison of poetic imagery from symbolic cataloguing to the analysis of generative mechanism.

Keywords

Gui; Laurel; Mythic Metaphor; Generative Mechanism; Classical Chinese and English Poetry

References

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