| Summary: | Taking in to account the analytical experience of Metaphorology, the article understudies deals with the ontological essence of a literary metaphor. It mostly occurs as a receptive issue and is regarded on a specific example of poetry by W. Shakespeare’s – the central figure of “the western canon”. Particular emphasis has been laid on Sonnet 64 and its Ukrainian and Russian translations, where the paradigm of time arises as a basic metaphor. According to O. Potebnia’s concept, time, as an image, always preserves its “inner form”: it is anthropomorphic and in all respects corresponds to the archaic mythologeme, which is further on is implemented as a detailed generative metaphor. A multi-componential metaphor of a “deadly thought” (“This thought is as a death”) about the destruction and fatal end of all things, which perfectly corresponds to the overall theme of the sonnet, consistently appears, unfolds and gets materialized in Shakespeare’s text. It transforms the abstraction of thought into a format of metaphorical imagery, the latter being distinctly conveyed in practically all translations. This metaphor is formed along an “ontological spiral” by zeugma (a four-time repetition of ‘when’, eventually attached to the generalization “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate...”). This classical figure also models a compositional frame of metaphors in the sonnet. Relying on the issue of primacy in the ontological pair “essence” and “substance”, we might conclude that metaphor, being treated as a subjective reality-text, creates simultaneously “non-being” and is considered as a specific, fragmentary copy of the world, its quasi-original. The paradox of the phenomenon lies in the fact that “plunging” into the metaphorical field, we thus deeply penetrate into non-being, however heading to reality.
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