'Ship of Time' and 'Ship of Death': from mythopoetic model of the world to modern cognition (a case study of Modern Greek poetry)

Abstract

The paper focuses on metaphorization of time as a ship in the Modern Greek poetry that appears in its interrelation with the Ship of Death imagery, revealing a set of mythologemes. Modern Greek poetry inherits mythopoetic features of Indo-European myth of dying and rising sun that is commonly depicted as sailing on a boat, the motif that signifies the conceptualization of time. The poetic concept of time takes shape in correlation of ship with the concepts of age and nostalgia, in the metaphor: ‘sailing on a ship is the process of recollecting’, and in the metaphorization of ship as an embodiment of unreachable past. Space and time correlate to the ship sailing to the lower world – deep into the memories – where the past acquires the features of the netherworld. The personification of ship, along with the materialization of memory, can be compared to the personification of the sun as the eye of the gods in mythology. The research sets concepts and cognitive metaphors, which have been shaped within mythopoetic features: ‘dichotomy order-chaos’, ‘mythopoetic journey through life’, ‘vertical structure of cosmos: Upperworld and Netherworld’, as well as ‘ship as a means of travel to the Netherworld’, and ‘chthonic features of the ocean’.

Keywords

• metaphor
• concept
• solar myth
• time metaphor
• death metaphor
• indo-european studies
• modern greek language
• modern greek poetry