The Concept of Love in the Poetry of Tetiana Vasylivna Yakovenko

This article examines the artistic representation of the concept of love in the poetry of Tetiana Vasylivna Yakovenko. Drawing on the poems «Did You Love Me or Not?», «Wait for Me…», «You Will Not Wipe Away My Tears», «And Then I Looked at the Star…», «Where Is Happiness? Where Is Pain?», and «I Have Dreamed of This Before…», the study explores the ways in which love is conceptualised as a complex spiritual and emotional phenomenon encompassing the desire for unity, waiting, memory, loneliness, emotional pain, self-sacrifice, moral trial, and the hope of inner renewal. The theoretical framework draws on cognitive linguistics, linguocultural studies, and literary approaches to textual interpretation. These perspectives make it possible to approach a concept as a multidimensional construct in which conceptual, imagistic, emotional, and axiological components interact. Particular attention is paid to the system of symbolic images – including the star, night, moon, river, autumn, snow, wind, light, tears, and music – which contributes to the formation of the author’s distinctive representation of the experience of love. The analysis demonstrates that love in Yakovenko’s poetry extends beyond the representation of intimate feelings. It emerges as a means of spiritual self-discovery, an inner trial, an experience of loss, and, at the same time, a potential means of overcoming alienation. The article identifies the functions of metaphor, symbolism, personification, psychological landscape, anaphora, epiphora, rhetorical questions, exclamatory constructions, repetition, antithesis, syntactic parallelism, and gradation in conveying the emotional dynamics of lyrical experience. It argues that the author’s conceptualisation of love develops at the intersection of personal experience, spiritual and moral values, and the symbolic interpretation of the world.