Metaphorical images represent a new relationship which a poet creates, establishes and constructs between something and
something else or between things and human feelings. Liu Xie, a famous literary critic in ancient China, differentiated the
metaphorical images from the Book of Songs down to th e Southern Dynasties into two types: semantic metaphors and
categorical metaphor s. For the metaphorical images in the Kingdom of Wei, the Jin Dynasty and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the poets represented their feelings and noti ons by drawing categorical metaphors from things and phenomena around. Since the images of their categorical metaphors stressed mainly the imitation of sound, c olour and appearance, some of their metaphorical images lack the technical link between the object and the psychological response on the part of the subject, wh ile others are of rich aesthetic connotations. Moreover, the comtemporary poets managed to develop the metaphorical images of deriving and expanding functions a nd showed a tendency towards metaphors in a broad sense by simplifying the relat ionship between the metaphorical images and by merging the subject and the objec t into one whole.