Paradise lost: Cognitive grammar, nature, and the self in Diane Seuss’s ekphrastic poetry

Abstract Diane Seuss’s ekphrastic poetry collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is a celebration of life and death, imagination and reality, stillness and movement. This paper focuses on the first poem of the collection to investigate the relationship between the poetic persona and the landscape surrounding her. I employ central principles of cognitive linguistics as applied in the field of stylistics to discuss the manifestation of her mind style and examine how she constructs and situates herself in the environment. Drawing on Langacker’s notion of construal, I analyze the perspective and the degree of specificity of the descriptions. I also trace the extensive use of the container image schema that underlies the semantics of the poem. The paper demonstrates that despite her assumed idyllic existence, the poetic voice’s ornate descriptions of nature conceal a sense of uneasiness and confinement and the highly granular lexical choices and figurative expressions reveal her anthropocentric view of the environment. This gives rise to her feelings of alienation while the presence of the container image schema reinforces her sense of confinement. From an ecostylistic perspective, the analysis demonstrates how an anthropocentric view may manifest itself linguistically, highlighting textual features of anthropocentric narratives.